Jacobian

• Jacobian 23 Jun 2019 4:11 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Lonelinesses

  I love the “air gap” metaphor, that’s ex­actly what I was get­ting at.

Pod­cast—Pu­tanu­monit on The Switch

• Jacobian 11 Jun 2019 18:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Get Rich Real Slowly

  The first para­graph in the post links to Get Rich Slowly , the post where I ex­plain the why and how of get­ting 6-8% on global equity in­dex funds.

• Jacobian 11 Jun 2019 3:57 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: Get Rich Real Slowly

  Thank you and thanks to Lan­rian for the tip!

Get Rich Real Slowly

Lonelinesses

Think­ing Fast and Hard

The State of Affairs

Buy­ing Value, not Price

In­ter­view with Putanumonit

Airportpourri

• Jacobian 13 Mar 2019 15:58 UTC

  2 points

  on: You Have About Five Words

  This im­me­di­ately got me think­ing about poli­tics.

  How many vot­ers could tell you what Obama’s plat­form was in 2008? But 70,000,000 of them agreed on “Hope and Change”. How many could do the same for Trump? But they agreed on “Make Amer­ica Great Again”. McCain, Rom­ney, and Hillary didn’t have a four-words-or-less mem­o­rable slo­gan, and so...

Ex­po­nen­tial Secretary

Co­op­er­a­tion is for Winners

• Jacobian 12 Feb 2019 15:14 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Mas­culine Virtues

  The list of things which in­volve work­ing on a team and are not straight mis­ery is very short. At the mo­ment I can come up with noth­ing that isn’t com­pet­i­tive.

  Mar­riage and a fam­ily, if you do it right. Spouses have very al­igned in­cen­tives, along with the added bonus of sex­ual at­trac­tion and out­side ex­pec­ta­tions of work­ing to­gether. It’s tragic when cou­ples turn mar­riage from co­op­er­a­tion to com­pe­ti­tion, but it’s not at all in­evitable.

• Jacobian 31 Jan 2019 19:47 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Mas­culine Virtues

  This is a good point. In fact, I wrote an es­say for Rib­bon­farm about avoid­ing com­pe­ti­tion where you can, such as in ed­u­ca­tion, ca­reers, and dat­ing.

  This is not a con­tra­dic­tion. This post is about build­ing *traits* that let you be com­pet­i­tive. That’s why sports is the best place to learn them: it’s a very be­nign and rule-bound form of com­pe­ti­tion, very un­like cut­throat poli­tics, academia, AI star­tups etc. Build­ing skills that al­low you to com­pete doesn’t mean you have to seek out zero-sum con­tests to grind your life away at, but it does mean that you won’t get scared away from a field if it be­comes com­pet­i­tive and starts form­ing a hi­er­ar­chy. It lets you choose where to com­pete.

  Ex­am­ple: MIRI can work on AI safety at its leisure be­cause it suc­cess­fully com­peted for a high rank in the hi­er­ar­chy of EA or­ga­ni­za­tions. MIRI has to com­pete for dona­tions and em­ploy­ees, and sports­man­ship val­ues let it do so with­out de­stroy­ing other EA orgs along the way.

• Jacobian 31 Jan 2019 16:19 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Mas­culine Virtues

  Ac­cord­ing to Statista, 10-11% of Amer­i­cans be­low the age of 50 have played soc­cer in the last 12 months. Wikipe­dia puts that num­ber at 24 mil­lion and ris­ing in 2006. There are 4 mil­lion play­ers reg­istered with offi­cial US Soc­cer As­so­ci­a­tion, but I play ev­ery week and have no idea what that is.

  So there are some­where be­tween 5 mil­lion and 30 mil­lion peo­ple who play soc­cer *reg­u­larly* in the US, and 25,000 were ad­mit­ted to a hos­pi­tal for head in­juries for a rate of 1/​200-1/​1200.

  I play ev­ery week but I don’t go fly­ing into the sort of aerial tack­les that end up with two play­ers bang­ing heads, as well as be­ing cau­tious about my cra­nium in gen­eral. If my chance of head in­jury given this is 1/​1000 each year, play­ing soc­cer is still worth it.

Mas­culine Virtues

• Jacobian 23 Jan 2019 18:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Cur­ing the World of Men

  Come on, man. I link to the source that I think would be most rele­vant for my read­ers to un­der­stand the fol­low­ing dis­cus­sion. In this case, it’s the offi­cial APA re­lease on the APA web­site de­scribing the APA guidelines, it’s not like I was link­ing to some third party ac­count. As for the PDF with the guidelines them­selves, I link to it at least twice in my post and it is linked from the re­lease as well.

Cur­ing the World of Men