Currently in Frankfurt, used to be in Karlsruhe.
Felix Karg
Karma: 123
Oh yeah. This reminds me about a ‘habit-building-trick’ I’ve read somewhere else, basically: “You don’t just want to do it, you want to become a person who does it, and then you can focus on something else”.
So yeah, rapidly adapting your identity might be a superpower after all. With all the downsides it entails.
Achievement unlocked: more Up votes than original post.
Intuitively, everything with something resembling a lifecycle comes to mind: humans, companies, countries—heck, even star systems. What I haven’t seen before: estimates on politician turnover, friendships/relationships and … chairs. Let’s do it.
Politicians: from small parties, most simply ‘dabble’ a bit on the side, and stop after a few years/voting cycles when they have no success, or stay for 20+ years with success. So I’d guess average would be about 5 years, as I’d expect the distribution to be heavily skewed. Estimate is for Europe/Germany, particularly the county and federal level. Relevant for …
shorter timescales: scandals and voting results.
longer timescales: Lobbying efforts.
Friendships/Relationships: I’d count about every positive interaction with everyone else as a ‘relationship’, and it’s only an ongoing one if you’re interacting at least once a month, but not e.g. interactions with restaurant staff. Since most interactions are with people you’re together with rather frequently (school, uni, work, …), and only ‘rarely’ have just a single encounter, I’d assume average turnover to be around 2-3 years. Relevant for …
shorter timescales: moving, pandemics, travelling
longer timescales: pandemics, traumas, character development
Chairs: financially, you can write off most furniture over about five years, so I’d expect their average lifetime to be at least twice that. Realistically, most chairs are probably good for about 15 years (on average), though I’d expect more complex chairs to break down earlier while simple wooden chairs could live quite a bit longer.
shorter timescales: starting a new household/office/school, fire/water damage
longer timescales: city humidity, environment (private home with careful use vs. public library with abuse)
In Germany (as has most of Europe), we still have several mask-requirements, even for those fully vaccinated (e.g. for within shopping centers/supermarkets, most public buildings, …). Honestly, I’m quite happy with that and don’t think it’ll change anytime soon.
Also, there are preventive measures known and correlated with incidence, though it’s currently in discussion to couple it to hospital bed availability as well. So should cases go up, everyone already knows what is bound to happen, and when.
I’m quite happy with the current situation, and apart from a few exceptions it seems mostly stable, with delta being dominant for a few weeks now. Vaccination is progressing steadily as well (61% first shot, ~50% second).
First: I’m also thinking of ‘getting paid for a job’ as a trade, fundamentally it’s ‘generating value’ for money. It’s similar with most investment opportunities: they either provide (immediate) value or have the capability to generate value. This will stay at least until no one needs that anymore, maybe because everyone is being administered by an AGI and robots, so no one has to work.
Second: Sharing fruits of labor/economies of scale. Basically the physicalized version of ‘expertise sharing’, e.g. I’m going to build your house while you’re out working, because I already have the trucks and everything ready and planned out. Will stay until we’re in the simulation, and we don’t have to care about (most) physical stuff.
Third: Rare Materials. Or rather: unequal distribution of resources (like food or diamonds). Even if we have the same preferences, we unlikely have the same access.
Fourth: Access to leisure experiences. If I want to go to a space hotel, that requires a few people working together for that, and not everyone has access to it or can offer it. So I’ll have to trade my leftover ‘generating value’-payment (subtracting costs for living and others) somehow to pay for their generated value—me being able to see outside a mostly black and very cold window. Same with sailing or other, someone owns the boat, someone owns the haven, they provide value for you so you’ve got to pay them.
[APPRENTICE] for character development / lessons for life. Not sure what exactly I expect, but I want to create workshops about these things eventually, as my contribution to raising the sanity waterline. I still have a lot of learning to do first, so I’m asking for an opportunity to do so.
What do I mean exactly: Basic useful skills like public speaking, charisma, communication (speech & text), financial intelligence, self-, and project management, teamwork-skills, leadership, and whatever else a ‘master’ would have at least a basic understanding and capability of. I’d be thrilled if you can just take on a single one I mentioned, or anything else I didn’t.
[APPRENTICE] for anything biology-related. Bonus for working in bioinformatics or simulating (metabolic) pathways. Also interested in joining some startup doing work in this area.
I’m doing a computer science master’s degree and visiting introductory biology lectures on the side, I’d love to build up on those. Additionally, I’m getting deeper in ML and simulation, and would be interested in applying it to biological data. I am currently reading a number of biology papers for creating a presentation which is to be held next month.
The fish-weight example was intuitive for me, but the temperature one wasn’t. Slightly reformulating the thoughts in my head:
of course temperature measurement is local
that’s what temperature is, I don’t care about the many possible distributions, only about the current local sample. That’s what’s affecting things around me, not some hypothetical distribution that isn’t instantiated right now.
Maybe you wanted to make a different point here, and I didn’t get it?
Sample-mean is not distribution-mean.
This is my key-takeaway from this post, thank you for writing it.
Awesome! Thanks for keeping us up-to-date!
From here, the plan is for Aysajan to spend the next few months working on the sorts of projects I worked on before focusing on alignment full time—the sorts of projects which I expect to build skills for solving problems-we-don’t-understand.
What kind of projects/problems are you thinking about? This might become a very valuable community resource, even for those of us without your guidance.
Guess you could say that!
I used to read a newspaper daily for half an hour during breakfast. At some point I read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSzpr8Y9299jdDLc9/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers and haven’t touched a newspaper for more than reading specific recommended articles since.
Related: Zvi had some notes on the general FDA approval process in his last COVID-Situation-update-post, regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/rencyawwfr4rfwt5C/p/PQACEuWpkSyRgHC4p#Waiting_on_AstraZeneca
I appreciate your fast meta-takes and responses on the current situation.
Speed premium, will hopefully flesh out more carefully in future
I would love to see a carefully fleshed out version, since it seems to have insights, applications and implications significantly beyond their immediately discussed content.
Ah, I see — the devil is in the detail. We are not really disagreeing about most things. I see it as a policy question where I think that network effects are more important, while your focus is (correct me if I got that wrong) on the importance of individual motivations.
that glamour/parties/fun are not the primary attractive feature of work for the people who are making the world move forward.
You are right, but their secondary effects are potentially more important: attracting more people who can work on moving the world forward. I can see why having a significant amount of people like that could be problematic for any organization, which is maybe (?) enough reason to avoid them on the policy level.
(there was a post about that some time ago, I tried to find it again but couldn’t. The basic argument was that charities should not claim to be the ‘single best’, since they could benefit more from people giving overall than competing against each other. The basic argument still holds: for big causes, more people are generally better if you can efficiently use them, whatever their primary motivation really is.)
Destroy the camaraderie, and the less talented/dedicated people, those who are most attracted to the sheer camaraderie, will quit.
In my experience, camaraderie is one of the attracting forces especially for more talented and dedicated people, since they already have/or can easily get ‘everything else’.
Good catch, I didn’t consider this possibility
Thank you for writing this, it was very helpful to me. I will read up on a number of links you provided in the post itself and other comments.
I’m starting to dabble in Biology since last Semester (Computer Science Bachelors, currently doing Master’s degree) as a minor, some of my current interests are:
Epigenetics
Especially related with newly available computational methods and experiments doable with CRISPR-modifications. What are the active areas of research?Simulation
Particularly of biological pathways or other relevant parts. What is commonly simulated? To what degree?Measuring
How easy it is to measure the ‘Hallmarks of Aging’, and how accurate are their relative predictions? What other measurements would be great to have (soon)?
For me, it is not ultimately clear that they are relevant for the field at all, so bear with my selfishness here. I would especially be interested in a (slightly more technical) introduction to the current state of the Art, active areas of research, how it is related to anti-aging research, and how to learn more about each of them.
Furthering anti-aging-research/awareness is actually a secondary career goal of mine, the first/current one is figuring out how to consistently raise the sanity waterline in organizations. It might even be possible to fulfill both at one organization, we’ll see.
Hey Elias, good questions!
What we need a lot of help with can, for the most part, be separated in three different time frames: before, during, and after the event. This means, specifically:
Before the event: Buildup. e.g. Building the reception/welcome desk, preparing workshop rooms, hanging up signs where the workshop rooms are, building the cuddle fort, prepare snack tables, …
Buildup will begin Friday at 9am at the location (official begin is around 6h later, so you’ll probably need to sleep over in Berlin the day before
During the event: Ops. e.g. Primarily re-filling snack tables, and other similarly small miscellaneous tasks which can be done between sessions.
Continuously during the event, but I don’t expect you to re-fill snack tables throughout the night or during meal times etc. Just have an eye out for the snack tables
After the event: Teardown. e.g. Bring back meditation pillows, dismantle the cuddle-fort, clean snack tables, remove signs, get the room keys from everyone back, …
Teardown will take a few hours on Monday (should be less than 6h, but any help is appreciated)
I’d want volunteers to commit to one or more of these time frames. This makes planning and coordination significantly easier.
At this point, we have a number of volunteers during the event, but are short-handed for tear down. We also appreciate additional help for buildup.
Best regards
Felix (Angel Coordinator)