adamzerner
When writing triggers memory reconsolidation
Believing vs understanding
I’ve thought about doing something similar with posing a question and offering a bounty for responses to the extent that they change my mind. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I don’t know why. Kudos to you for doing so!
In software development we sometimes play this game where you estimate how long a task will take, and then by sleight of hand the estimate becomes a commitment.
Yeah, I ran into that recently and it lead to issues. Not fun.
I actually don’t share that impression. The impression I get is that even for successful startups, there’s a sort of hedonic adaptation where your sights end up being set on a new goal, which then produces stress. Eg. feeling content is fleeting and it is common to always feel perpetually “behind”.
No problem.
To make sure I am understanding, are you saying that extra stress gives you an extra “oomph” that helps you achieve your goals? For me, it was the opposite, so marginal stress was harmful for me. Furthermore, my understanding is that this is true for others as well. Extra stress only provides an “oomph” when it is “good stress”, not “bad stress”.
Preparing for ambition
Happy paths and the planning fallacy
Seems worth referencing and linking to the HPMoR chapter Noticing Confusion.
$10M is a roughly standard value that the US government uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States.
1000x, the short answer is “the singularity seems pretty plausible, and given how powerful a singularity would be, assuming we get the alignment problem right, I’d think we’d live really, really, really, long lives”. I go into some more detail in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AL6jdmpcxESxQTpfQ/is-driving-worth-the-risk, although that post is still very hand-wavy.
In the OP, jasoncrawford says:
We see this in the US with covid: The same people who didn’t realize that we all should be wearing masks, when they were life-saving, are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.
At $10M/life, I can* agree that a mask isn’t worth it. But if we eg. 1000x the value of life, wearing a mask provides something like $5 of value instead of $0.005, and at that price it would be worth it. So the question becomes whether we should value life wildly highly like this.
The point I was trying to make in my comment was, “perhaps we should value life wildly highly like this”. The following is mentioned in the OP as a way to do “precognition”: “2. Listen to other independent thinkers.” As I explain in this post, I get the impression that if you go by the judgements of these expert, independent thinkers, it might be justifiable to value life wildly highly.
*Not wearing a mask feels like defecting in a prisoners dilemma to me, which makes me feel icky.
I’m not seeing where there is a tradeoff. Let’s assume you are making a 1hr grocery run in SF. From there, you are faced with a choice: mask or no mask. My argument is that life should be valued wildly highly, and thus wearing a mask is worth it. It’s not like wearing a mask is something that takes money or time, and that you could spend that money or time doing something more valuable (essentially).
The blogrolls on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ and https://www.overcomingbias.com/ come to mind as lists.
are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.
I’d like to offer a “precognition” rebuttal to this. If you value life at the typical $10M, one microcovid = $0.01, then wearing a mask “costs” $0.01. But if you value life at eg. 1000x that amount, then wearing a mask costs $10, a bad price to pay. Applying “2. Listen to other independent thinkers.”, my read on it is that the consensus opinion of experts is that the singularity is quite plausible, and that this would imply wildly longer lifespans. Putting those two things together, it seems reasonable to value life wildly more than is typical, and that you seem to be valuing it at in saying that we shouldn’t wear masks indoors anymore.
Definitely. I feel confident that it is something that will stick with me and have a meaningful influence on my thinking.
System 1 vs System II is a good example of poor naming in the academic community.
You might be interested in this perspective from the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel that Amsterdam being designed for pedestrians and bikers makes this problem of worrying about your kids being hit by a car mostly go away.
The other thing about filterPromotedPosts is that it kind of sounds like the input is promoted posts and the output is some unspecified subset of them. filterPostsForPromoted avoids that but starts to feel unwieldy to me. (But maybe I should just be more okay with unwieldy names.)
I have the exact same feelings here. It’s funny how hard this is to name! Although these issues go away if you think about the name as only one part of the boxes label, and the signature + docstring as the others. Sorta. I think it’d still be nice if the name did as much of the job as possible by itself without having to consult the signature or docstring.
Even in an impure language I think filter sounds to me like it would return a new list rather than editing in place.
In my experience the ideas of functional programming are things that a lot of people just aren’t aware of at all. I know that for me it was about seven years into my journey as a programmer before I started learning about them. Thinking about the people I have and do work with, I could very well see them using
filterPromotedPoststo mutate a list of posts. So in that environment, it seems like it’d be nice to make it extra clear that “this function isn’t actually mutating anything”. (Then again, I could also see them mutating stuff ingetPromotedPoststoo.)But in a different environment where the convention of “filter” being pure is strong enough, I agree with you. And I think that it’d often make sense to aspire towards this sort of environment. It’s interesting how much the right name depends on this sort of context.
Yeah that does make sense. I guess it depends on the feature in question and how close the competition is.