When it says “Sunday at 3:00 PM” on my screen, it is not obvious whether it is converting to local time for me (I assume it is but I don’t remember telling LW what my time zone was). I think the simplest “fix” is just to have your date/time renderer also render the timezone it is using.
lincolnquirk
Karma: 1,169
Hmm, maybe a 2. I didn’t know you had read the Sequences, but it seems like the sort of thing that would appeal to you based on the writing in Dancing, etc.
This is great, strong upvoted!
Offtopic but I’ve really enjoyed your work over the years (CATB & Hacker’s Dictionary from before I was a Less Wronger; Dancing With the Gods since). Glad to see you on LW, and thanks for the pointer to Heinlein’s Gulf which I hadn’t read, but was a solid read (though very clearly from the 1950s in its attitude—feels very outdated now).
Process Orientation
I haven’t googled it either but I have a strong prior against “matching sites” due to selection effect problems. Still, if I were to embark on a project like this I would probably see what the google says, in case there are surprises!
Thanks! I will browse the site and see if there are useful details about what others have tried!
The “good fences make good neighbors” thing is something I have heard elsewhere, and wonder about. I know it’s a widely repeated proverb, but I don’t know where it comes from. Do you have personal experience with why this is good wisdom? The obvious drawback with implementing it is cost (to duplicate facilities that are cheaper to share) and I would rather not incur the cost without understanding the why.
Do you have a sense of where to look for the right kind of people? (Feel free to answer for yourself, rather than trying to project what I or others might want)
Thanks! This gives me a lot of hope, that it can happen by accident. I would love to hear if you end up purchasing adjacent property, or if you would consider moving all together to another spot!
I went through a similar process to buy my first car (although I wasn’t considering children relevant, I did consider a dog and skiing supplies, as well as wanting to be able to transport friends). I eventually settled on a $10k used car from a dealership. I was originally expecting to buy a very used $3k car, but was convinced to increase my budget by the idea that driving a maintenance-needing car would be stressful, as you note. Advice I received was that $10k was around the sweet spot for a car that could still go a long time without needing much maintenance. I ended up buying from a dealership, which I considered a worthwhile premium because I knew nothing about cars.
I also wanted 4wd/awd for New England weather driving (I wouldn’t consider this essential for boston, but driving to outdoorsy things in the winter is less stressful with this feature). Also wanted decent highway mileage, mainly for environmental reasons. I ended up getting a 7-year-old Subaru Outback with just over 100k miles on it. It’s been a year now and I’m reasonably happy with the purchase.
My company, Wave, is building mobile money in the developing world (wave.com). We are a for-profit company helping mostly-unbanked people get access to money and digital markets. Besides the usual software engineering jobs, I’ve had particular trouble finding great senior product managers (3+ yrs experience in entrepreneurship, Product at tech companies, or engineering leadership) and head of information security (5+ yrs, ideally with some security certification experience). Not all of these roles are posted on our website so email me privately if you are interested! My email is lincoln at our url :)
Enabling Children
Oh darn :( I was really looking forward to this event but ended up being busy then. One of the benefits of doing stuff like this on Zoom is to engage a broader community—why stop at only people who can be there at the appointed time?
Would it have caused you to record it if I had asked nicely ahead of time? (I saw the announcement and knew I would likely be busy then. I could have thought to ask.)
Is there a recording/transcript/anything to watch after-the-fact?
Hmm, interesting. I suppose it would have, but it is hard to imagine what he could have told me in particular that goes beyond his essays. Maybe looking at the way I think and saying “you seem like the type to be a good startup founder”.
This did prod me to remember a wizard-experience I had in 8th grade. It was with my science teacher. I was one of the better students in his class (possibly the best), and I was at one point crowding him before class, very eager to see the results of a test. He took me aside and said something like “why are you spending so much mental energy on this? You’re smart enough that you’ll always do okay. You don’t need to get all As to be successful” (I don’t remember the exact words). This was enormously impactful on me—I think it immediately reduced my GPA, reduced my stress levels and increased my happiness & life satisfaction.
I really like this!
I got “permission” to be ambitious from Paul Graham’s essays. He definitely seemed like a mysterious old wizard but he also didn’t have to spend any time on me then (though I did eventually get some of his time, many years later in Y Combinator).
Dunno if this helps or hurts your theory.
I think a lot of these questions are answered in the radvac paper. I sent a copy of it to a biologist I know, and asked if he thought it was crazy to do this, and he read it and said “geez this looks safer than doing drugs”. I don’t have enough expertise to add anything beyond that.
Thanks for writing this sequence!
While I don’t normally love cryptocurrency, it does seem like an obviously good idea to buy some cryptocoin and send the key into the future. There are some considerations for doing so, such as “how can I ensure that the key is readable?”, and “how can I avoid accidentally depending on a cryptocoin organization that might not continue to exist?”
I don’t actually know the best practices, but I would guess that the best thing is to take ownership of the coin with your own privately generated key using a wallet app that gives you a key recovery string of words (I think they call this a seed phrase). This seems fairly common, most wallet apps should support it. I don’t know the best wallet app, but hopefully someone else can chime in with a recommendation for one that is open source, trustworthy and has a seed phrase feature.
Then you’ll want to back up your seed phrase heavily: search for a seed phrase engraving kit on Amazon, and stamp/engrave it into metal for your lockbox. Write it down on archival paper in pencil too.
Separately, also backup the wallet itself on a few different kinds of media (maybe a USB key and a writable cd/dvd).
Lastly, back up the source code for your wallet app both on the media and printing it out.
Note that all of these steps can be done even before you fund your wallet—funding can be done at any moment later on!
All these are great points! You’ve updated me that the IUL solves a real problem.
The thing I felt (and still feel) that you aren’t acknowledging is the investment returns on savings—with the IUL, the insurance company will invest the money and take all the upside; whereas if you save it yourself, you can keep that upside. In the linked post you assume a 0% return on savings.
I did run through a few scenarios with nonzero rates of return. The IUL doesn’t come out ahead in expectation, but it seems to have been designed well enough that if you want certainty, it wins:
Scenario A: $320/month saved for 15 years at 7% grows to $100k in those 15 years. Then you’re done. (Obviously that 7% rate of return comes with substantial risk, so you have a chance of not being at 100k at that instant; but you still have 5 years to solve the problem before your term runs out!) This has a high chance of solving the problem in 20 years instead of 60, and you still have the rest of your life for that investment to keep growing. That said, it’s still a risky strategy and I haven’t accounted for the cost of the term life premium.
Scenario B: $88/mo for life (your IUL quote). You will reach $100k at the 60-year mark as long as you average a 1.5% rate of return; at 2% you only need 54 years; at 3% it’s 46 years. Again, a risky strategy.
IUL gives you a certainty of death benefit with a relatively low monthly premium. The cost is basically all your upside, which is substantial, but like you said, I think it’s probably worth it for people who have the problems it solves.
Thanks very much for bringing this over from Facebook!