Low level crack dealers in gangs face worse pay and conditions than workers in most minimum wage jobs. My friendly independent neighborhood pot dealer makes a good living. There is still a risk of being robbed etc. without any legal recourse, but I’d imagine it’s a lot lower if you aren’t selling crack in the inner city.
jamesf
Karma: 349
Introducing Familiar, a quantified reasoning assistant (feedback sought!)
A few days ago I was talking with two people who had “experienced” total brain inactivity for some period of time before (one for a few days on ice!). I tried asking what they thought about the discontinuous experience/identity and associated philosophical issues that e.g. cryonics or other forms of not-being-alive for a while entails, but I couldn’t get them to interpret the question as anything besides “what do you think of the personality changes that might happen from such an event?”.
I found this miscommunication highly informative.
Status-seeking, essentially. Gang leaders are very high status in some circles, dealing drugs through gangs is a necessary part of becoming one. Of course actually becoming a gang leader is extremely unlikely, but then there aren’t many self-described rationalists who deal crack.
Anecdote time!
I had the high school resume to get into highly selective universities. For financial reasons, I instead went to my flagship state university. I expected the big fish in small pond effect to play to my advantage, and I did develop a reputation as “(one of) the smartest student(s) in the room” (which I’ll at least admit was a boon to my romantic desirability), but the most salient result was extreme loneliness. I wasn’t able to find many people I could have stimulating conversation with, and while I did make a few friends, none of them shared my degree of passion for intellectual subjects. This summer I’ve been at Hacker School, which I think is a correctly-sized pond for me, but the damage to my mood and social expectations from three years of being stuck in too small a pond has definitely impeded my ability to make friends and feel socially engaged. As of right now I’m attempting to find a job as a software developer so I can drop out of college in relative security, because college is that intolerable and I think I have a much better chance of finding more correctly-sized ponds on this path. (Transferring to a more selective university is still not a financial burden I’m willing to accept.)
I guess the takeaway here might be: while a small pond of the right size can have its advantages, larger ponds are much more likely to help you grow more, and ponds that are too small can be absolutely crushing. If finding a smaller pond consists of moving away from your current large pond, be extremely careful that it’s not too small.
“checking the name of the writer Ooookay, this article about appearance is written by a woman. As was expected. It’s probably not worth to read it...”
The best way to get me to actually throw charity out the window, is to imply that I’m likely to throw charity out the window because I explicitly thought a dumb thing relating to your personal characteristics.
At the end of the day, go through the things you did. What did you do and why? How did you feel while you did it? Doing it in writing can be helpful (this is what journaling is). Or even get scientific and quantify things so you can analyze your data later!
cough this software I write for that last thing cough
[the US] isn’t that far away from a survival-traditional oriented society
America contains multitudes; by living in the right place and exposing yourself to the right information, you don’t really have to be aware of all the people who determined its World Values Survey results. (I suspect this is also true in Brazil...)
the fact [New Zealand] is in the freaking middle of nowhere is very discouraging.
Why? You haven’t expressed that living somewhere with high population density or lots of popular nearby attractions is important to you.
Finally, note that you could remove “rationally” from the title and exactly the same meaning would be conveyed, since we’re on a blog about rationality.
Because this is a site about rationality.
Peter Norving was a resident at Hacker School while I was there, and we had a brief discussion about existential risks from AI. He basically told me that he predicts AI won’t surpass humans in intelligence by so much that we won’t be able to coerce it into not ruining everything. It was pretty surprising, if that is what he actually believes.
Open thread
There’s not a “person who makes all the site changes people want”. Site changes seem to always be on a volunteer basis (meaning, do it yourself if you want it badly).
Requiring people to fork over any amount of money at all usually results in many fewer participants. This doesn’t seem better overall as long as other effective solutions to spam exist.
Many of these seem false to me, generally the ones that claim understanding things and curiosity will help you not make money. I think more than half of my free-time reading in the last several years has increased my money-making ability in my expected career (software) to some extent, and a sizable portion of that was probably pretty close to optimal among things I could realistically be doing with that time (admittedly, that is a factor in what I choose to read; practicality appeals to me). My infovorism has made me a good technical communicator, and my exposure to decision sciences and cognitive biases right here on LessWrong over the past few years seem to make up a sizable portion of what people learn in an MBA (granted, those are more about signaling and contacts than knowledge), to say nothing of all the computer science and software engineering and statistics knowledge I’ve accumulated.
One notable counterexample who is not me: Warren Buffett, currently the third wealthiest human.
Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.”
What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking.
“You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented.
When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said he “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”
Basically, a lot of your advice is heavily dependent on your interests. You might accidentally find that you have a ton of valuable technical skills and are an effective communicator with surprisingly good decision-making ability if you read the wrong things for too long.
She had cardiac arrest and they cooled her down to prevent organ damage. Now that I research it more, probably not enough to completely stop brain activity, though that was the premise of the question and they seemed to understand that part.
Most people are primarily interested in things that won’t go very far in making money, and basically everyone likes to do a lot of things they won’t ever get paid for; both are undeniable. “Be interested only in things that do nothing to increase your ability to earn money” is a very good way, indeed just about the best way, to not make money.
Your sarcasm is appreciated :-)
Hacker School is totally free (with living expenses paid if you’re a woman). I believe five rationalists including myself have done it. Unlike most bootcamps it has basically no official structure—you and all the other hackers/aspiring hackers think of cool stuff to do and then do it. They will help you become a better programmer and find a job. The community is great.
Yes, I’m pretty sure this is currently the most significant hurdle to getting people to want to use it (this isn’t the ’80s!). Adding some kind of browser-based GUI is my current task.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren’t all reinforcing/teaching each other.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer, and I need a place to stay in NYC between approximately June 1 and August 23. Does anyone want an intrepid 20-year-old rationalist and aspiring hacker splitting the rent with them?
Also, applications for this batch of Hacker School are still open, if you’re looking for something great to do this summer.
Next survey, I’d be interested in seeing statistics involving:
Recreational drug use
Quantified Self-related activities
Social media use
Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
Self-perceived holistic attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
Personal computer’s operating system
Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year’s.