EA Forum developer
jp
Karma: 692
Do Anki while Weightlifting
Many rationalists appear to be interested in weightlifting. I certainly have enjoyed having a gym habit. I have a recommendation for those who do:
Try studying Anki cards while resting between weightlifting sets.
The upside is high. Building the habit of studying Anki cards is hard, and if doing it at the gym causes it to stick, you can now remember things by choice not chance.
And the cost is pretty low. I rest for 90 seconds between sets, and do about 20 sets when I go to the gym. Assuming I get a minute in once the overheads are accounted for, that gives me 20 minutes of studying. I go through about 4 cards per minute, so I could do 80 cards per visit to the gym. In practice I spend only ~5 minutes studying per visit, because I don’t have that many cards.
I’m not too tired to concentrate. In fact, the adrenaline high makes me happy to have something mentally active to do. Probably because of this, it doesn’t at all decrease my desire to go to the gym.
I find I can add simple cards to my Anki deck at the gym, although the mobile app does make it slow.
Give it a try! It’s cheap to experiment and the value of a positive result is high.
What to do if you suddenly need to rest your hands
On Monday I went from “computer work seems kind of uncomfortable, I wonder if I should be worried” to “oh crap oh crap, that’s actually painful”. Everything I’ve ever heard says not to work through RSI pain, so what now? I decided to spend a week learning hands free input. I wanted to a) get some serious rest and b) still be productive. And guess what? Learning hands free input is like the one activity that does not suffer a productivity penalty from not being able to use your hands.
When I started it was really slow going. Lots of yelling “no don’t type ‘delete word’ delete the f**king word!!!”[1] But then I found this talk, which was just .. woah. Since then, I have been using Talon, and I am in love.
The key to understanding Talon, and the reason I think it’s heads and shoulders above everything else I’ve tried, is the basic insight that most of the time the input you want to do is not writing. Talon has the concept of modes, and most of the time you’re in the command mode.[2] And because there’s a limited set of commands, there’s much less ambiguity between inputs.
After one week, I’m able to dictate an existing code file painlessly albeit still slowly. The thing that feels important to me, is that I’m no longer living in fear of my career being taken away from me by my wrists.
So my recommendation to you, if you find yourself in the situation I was is to rest your hands, and try learning this thing. If you do, reach out to me! I’m (at least currently) sufficiently excited about this that I would very much enjoy help you out.
Epistemic postscript: I’m writing this while still excited about it, which is providing the motivation to do the writeup, but also makes me believe that in the future I will be less optimistic, and you should take that into account when evaluating its implicit predictions.
***
[1] A word to the wise, if you have dictation software listening, yelling at your computer is the opposite of productive (this is good, a frustrating experience with quick negative reinforcement for outbursts induces a zen-like experience).
[2] This is similar to vim, if you’re familiar.
I love this post. Both the content, and the writing — I felt like you were happily telling me about your interest, and it made me happy.
This comment feels like wishful thinking to me. Like, I think our communities are broadly some of the more truth-seeking communities out there. And yet, they have flaws common to human communities, such as both 1 and 2. And yet, I want to engage with these communities, and to cooperate with them. That cooperation is made much harder if actors blithely ignore these dynamics by:
Publishing criticism that could wait
Pretend that they can continue working on that strategy doc they were working on, while there’s an important discussion centered on their organization’s moral character happening in public
I have a long experience of watching conversations about orgs evolve. I advise my colleagues to urgently reply. I don’t think this is an attempt to manipulate anyone.
“Cruxy” is a useful term to have in my vocabulary. I use it relatively loosely to refer to the type of thing I look for in a double crux. A consideration is more “cruxy” if it’s closer to a but-for support for a proposition. Interestingly (mildly) this is very similar to the definition of “crucial,” and in fact the etymologies are the same.
I’m here for the parables and the pun titles. Thanks for providing me a little of Scott Alexander during the SSC drought.
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
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.
———
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.
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.
I felt like this was a scarily accurate description of my focus situation. And then I read the part about the chocolate, and like, good lord, get out of my head.
She mentioned Philip was a client. He’s literally paying to be other-optimized. Also, she’s citing enough evidence to get around the typical problem of a failure to generalize.
I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that’s reasonably popular. I thought I’d crosspost here. The context is “What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?”
***
CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of “who owns this ball.”[1] I’m gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.
Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls
If you are having a conversation and someone’s like “we should do X”… Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.
If there’s a “ball” (a task of some sort) that’s sitting around and not moving forward, and anyone has any uncertainty about who’s responsible for it, they should flag that.
Example: “Ok, who owns the ball of reaching out to GWWC?”
Level 2: Passing balls
Be extremely clear in your communication when you’re handing off a ball to someone else, or taking on a ball. This prevents balls from getting dropped in the first place. We use dedicated emoji-jargon for this at CEA:
🏈 for handing off a ball
🤾 for catching a ball
Example: “I’m not sure what happened there, looks like a bug. 🏈 to you to fix?”
Level 3: Systems that prevent dropped balls
We have a round robin system in our code reviews, to make sure that each code review is assigned to a single reviewer, who knows that it’s their job to review that code. The reviewer then assigns the task back to the original developer to address comments and/or merge the code. The code review can literally never be in an ambiguous state. (Ideally anyway. Human be humans, and it happens.)
Both our developers and our moderators has the concept of an “on-call” rotation, both developed by me. Quoting from the moderator on-call doc:
You should be aiming to ensure an efficiently running ship. It’s your job this week to make sure that everything’s running smoothly. That does not mean doing everything yourself. But this week, the buck of dropped balls does stop with you.
***
I think I’ve done a fair job of communicating the type of thing I mean, but it really goes quite deep and broad for me. As I predicted, moreso than this suggests.
- ^
I wrote this answer, and then realized I needed to give a shout out to @amywilley and the (CEA) events team, who really embody the spirit of this philosophy. Amy at one point bought like 40 styrofoam balls and had CEA write tasks they were worried might be getting dropped on them, and then we went around finding an owner for the balls, or deciding to drop them by choice.
🙇♂️
Rohin argues elsewhere for taking a vote (at least in principal). If 50% vote in favor, then he has successfully avoided “falling into the unilateralist’s curse” and has gotten $1.6k for AMF. He even has some bonus for “solved the unilateralist’s curse in a way that’s not just “sit on his hands”. Now, it’s probably worth subtracting points for “the LW team asked them not to blow up the site and the community decided to anyway.” But I’d consider it fair play.
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.”
I just want to say that this looks beautiful, and the ad you have on the homepage is fabulous. I also expect to enjoy reading it.
Lead developer here. Yes. By “based off of,” he means “forked from with fairly minimal changes.”
This post is very cute. I also reference it all the time to explain the ‘inverse cat tax.’ you You can ask my colleagues, I definitely talk about that model a bunch. So, perhaps strangely, this is my most-referenced post of 2022. 🙃
My explanation of a model tax: this forum (and the EA Forum) really like models, so to get a post to be popular, you gotta put in a model.
My partner asks if there’s an ebook version. I’m pretty sure he’s not trying to troll you.