EA Forum developer
jp
Karma: 688
It seems plausible that it’s correct to treat a piece of information as approaching very close the fact-ness. If I say that a cup contains an kilogram of water, there’s some sense in which this is not a pure fact, but it seems very close to a pure fact, and although pure-factness about water in this cup may be unattainable, it is not infinitely far away.
😛 Dangit, my American intuition wasn’t good enough. I was kinda close, only a factor of 2 maybe.
Here’s a pessimistic takeaway. One should expect a site that was providing a lot of value to its users to grow, even if it wasn’t explicitly trying to.
Perhaps most of the value of the site is in the fact that it has posts, comments and votes. Beyond that it’s the value of the content, and that is modest and static.
View is lightly held, and I’m not drawing much in the way of conclusions from it. I am still impressed with the feature roadmap and the velocity of improvement.
Clarifying:
The hypothesis is: the value of the site technical functionality to the average user is mostly the posts, comments and votes. That’s already built so the work on the margin hasn’t increased the value that much. The real room for variation is the value of the content (writing) on the site. The value of that content is modest (not huge) and static (not growing).
Paul Graham is such a fun read, but when I have my skeptical hat on I don’t find myself convinced. What’s the mechanism of action? If LW doesn’t die it will eventually achieve its aims because .. ?
I do like the lens of product-market fit, and I tentatively agree LW doesn’t really have it. I guess you could say that you have successfully avoided dying and now you get to continuing swinging at ideas until you hit a home run.
[Question] What is the evidence for productivity benefits of weightlifting?
Good question. I think two weeks is reasonable. I can extend it if someone messages me saying they’re still working.
Reminder that the prize will be awarded this Sunday the 16th.
The Sequences could use a refresher possibly.
Deep Work was my immediate thought after Elizabeth’s spot check.
You can ask a related question with the LW UI.
See some related work here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7fDEWxY8LD4qmf2NF/what-is-the-evidence-for-productivity-benefits-of-1
I wonder if hereisonehand would be interested in a repeat performance.
My model is something like: “these effects dance around the edge of significance and have a bunch of uncontrolled variables that differ between studies, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the results aren’t consistent.” Now, that might cause you lower your credence in the whole endeavor, which in fact I do.
Here’s a conceptual clarification that deconfused me somewhat. – The zeroth instantiation of the internet was the telephone network. The alpha version was when someone first made a modem to let computers send 1s and 0s over the telephone system. And that was it. You had the ability for computers to talk to other ones in different cities.
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A different 0th version was computers hooked up directly to other computers.
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The beta version involved Usenet, emails, etc.
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Finally we get to what people talk about when they say the “invention of the internet” and a web of pages that pointed you to other pages when you clicked on links. I think the reason this gets so much attention is because the previous versions were just immensely less powerful.
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There’s so much more about this I wish I knew.
I’d really like to write more. I’ve noticed that some ideas become much better after I write them up, and some turn out to be worse than I initially thought. I’d also like to expand my ability to have conversations to include online spaces, which, as a confirmed lurker, I didn’t really have much of until after I found myself writing code for the EA Forum. I’m going to try writing a shortform post a day for a week. Acceptable places to post include here on LW, the EA Forum, Facebook, and my org’s slack. I’d like to go for at least one each.
If that goes well, my next step might be to try this thing called editing and post every other day. After that I’d like to try writing some top level posts.
Friday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#MBNfFKQwa8LQdBceQ
Saturday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#pZ39ANtDxRK7X9KXv
Sunday: ✓ (FB)
Monday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#SopSodvjwvkdAHe2G
Tuesday: ✓ (Slack)
Wednesday: ✓ (Slack)
Thursday: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWoT7mABXTfkCdHvr/jp-s-shortform#rCYFRZ2YoSfyYiXrh
Some thoughts on free time
I’ve had discussions recently about how to spend free time. I’m blessed with a job with relatively well-specified boundaries (I don’t typically work on weekends or outside the hours I’m at the office), but I often still feel like I’m sucked into “unproductive” things in my free time. Here are some things I could want to do during my free time:
1 Maximize global utility directly
2 Maximize moment-to-moment hedonic happiness
3 Maximize long term hedonic happiness
4 Maximize mental recovery for later productivity
5 Use a virtue heuristic for doing things that seems “worthwhile”
6 Do whatever one feels like in the moment
7 Try to accomplish things that sound cool
(1) Seems penny-wise, pound foolish, and paradoxically hurt my altruistic efforts. All of the ones with maximize I endorse caring about to some extent, but not maximizing. I’m especially interested in 4. I feel like 5 has led to some great victories for me. 6 obviously guides a lot of what I do. I’m happy that I do it, but I don’t want to elevate it the way some people do. I like doing 7 sometimes, but often it trades of against 1, 2, 4, and 6, in which case I mostly end up not doing it. Thus I think most of my accomplishments have come during work hours. I’m basically ok with this.
Sometimes 6 ends up tanking efforts to do 1-5,7. Here’s a list of some things that I don’t endorse doing:
1 Binge watching netflix, youtube etc.
2 Scrolling through facebook, twitter, etc.
3 Playing a videogame that grows to consume my time
4 Writing code < 1.5 hours before I’d like to go to bed
5 ~Half of the times I stay up late at parties
I claim that these are usually bad for essentially all of the other goals.
Here are some things that I endorse doing:
1 Visiting individual blogs are reading through what I’ve missed
2 Churning my personal Evernote todos
3 Trying to answer something I’m curious about
4 Hanging out with friends/boyfriend
There’s a gap here where the unendorsed list has a bunch of things I can do even when I’m exhausted, and the endorsed list usually requires at least a little bit of awake-ness. This often makes me very reluctant to take stimulant holidays. The problem I think is that zero effort things are very low points in the energy landscape. This is what makes individual blogs so useful. They’re pretty low energy, but they run out of content quickly.
I’d be interested in other recommendations for low energy but finite activities and additions to the goals list.
For sure. This is actually something that made me curious about the internet writ large. If the WWW was just one thing built on the internet, then why do I get mostly answers for the WWW when I look up history of the internet? (Because the WWW was so useful.) Why did the internet already exist when the WWW came along? (Because it was just the phone lines and some modems.)
For this purpose there are two related dynamics. How much activation energy it takes to start, and how much energy it takes to leave (usually inversely related). Like an object in a potential energy landscape, being in a low energy state makes it harder to move to a high energy state. I agree there’s a surprising lack of correlation between low energy states and relaxing states. Meditating is a clear example of a high energy state, but it is pretty restorative. I don’t find binge watching restorative after maybe the first episode or so, but I do find reading a blog for 10 minutes to be so*.
*Possibly because by “blog” you’re thinking “intellectual blog like SSC”, and I’m talking about what’s half the time a tumblr blog.
YA Novels and Human Talent Distributions
I take a dim view of how I spent my free time as a teenager. Reverse to how many people see it, I think my school time was great for me and my intellectual development, while my spare time often made me a worse thinker.* In particular, I’ll call out my habit of videogames and YA fantasy novels. Here’s a thing I wish I hadn’t learned.
In YA novels, if you’ve ever spent 10 minutes living in the woods, you’re now an A+ expert on all things forestry. It doesn’t matter if you’re up against an adversary who logically would have spent years training for this, don’t worry, if a single person on your team has some plausibly related piece of backstory, you’re going to have an advantage.
Additionally, your primary talent is probably something where you have a god-given advantage over the rest of the world.
So fantasy novels are unrealistic. I noticed this while reading them. I still think I’d rather read books that will leave my system 1 with a more accurate understanding of talents. But what I noticed recently was that I didn’t quite appreciate that these novels (and books) had discontinuities of talent. Many talents are power law distributed, to be sure, but more commonly they are normally distributed.
I’ve noticed myself appreciating that I/my friend/coworker/acquaintance are good at something, and then it taking a while to realize how not-special their talent is, to the detriment of my predictions about the world.
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Another anti-useful learning: I spent years training my intuitive appreciation for how often a 90% accurate attack will miss on game THAT LIED ABOUT IT’S ACCURACY.
* I think I still am my best self doing productive things and often my spare time is spent unproductively.
Bruce Schneier’s original security mindset blogpost basically just says “look for holes in things.” I thought I remembered the concept as being more interesting when I read it on LW and sure enough, Eliezer’s post was much more cogent. “The reason security is hard is because there’s someone optimizing the system down paths that lead to bad outcomes.”
Lead developer here. Yes. By “based off of,” he means “forked from with fairly minimal changes.”