You can find links to all of my Less Wrong writings plus some extras on my blog.
lsusr
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Personally, I am allergic to application processes. Especially opaque ones. I likely would have never joined this website if there was an application process for new users. I don’t think the site is too crowded with bad content right now, though that’s certainly a potential problem if more people choose to write posts. If lots more people flood this site with low quality posts then an alternative solution could be to just tighten the frontpage criteria.
For context: I was not part of Less Wrong 1.0. I have only known Less Wrong 2.0.
Czynski claims to find “almost nothing of value which is less than five years old”. It may be more efficient for Czynski to write high-quality posts instead.
Thanks. Fixed.
I think so too. I found this to be a useful introduction to lots of interesting things at exactly my preferred level of technical detail. I even like the level of technical level of your links.
mindless labor like farming
Thanks for pointing out this error. I have replaced “farming” with “agricultural labor”.
I was not talking about a particular state. I was just wrong. Thank you for the correction. I have added a note to the original post.
The Flexibility of Abstract Concepts
Ultimately, the only way out is to get rich. But there do exist books that can help point you in this direction. If you only had time to read one book I would recommend:
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
To stare deeper into the void you can add:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
anything written by Chuck Palahniuk
To assemble an entrepreneur mindset out of what’s left of your mind you can read:
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
Built, Not Born: A Self-Made Billionaire’s No-Nonsense Guide for Entrepreneurs by Tom Golisano and Mike Wicks
Paul Graham’s writings
Of course, it’s not enough just to read books. Reading books and talking about books—without doing things—is a middle class behavior.
No one can tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
I like how these ideas are falsifiable, in the sense that that they have clear performance success criteria. It is possible to evaluate whether we hit these milestones (if we do so before a increase). I also like how it addresses several different potential directions for AI development instead of just scaling today’s most popular architectures.
It weirds me out how little NAS (Neural Architecture Search) in particular (and throwing compute at architecture searche in general) is used in industry.
Economic Class
We should not raise awareness
Pacific Time Zone Discussion
Children like it when I cook vegetables. If they’re leafy greens like spinach then I stir-fry them with garlic and oil. If they’re hearty vegetables then I roast them with salt, pepper and spices. I never boil them. I also ferment vegetables, which children do not like.
There are two issues: One of them is using the same term in different ways. The deeper mistake is believing words have well-defined meanings at all. I think the deeper issue is the more important one. If you solve the deeper issue then the first issue might solve itself.
Yudkowsky’s Disputing Definitions is a good place to start. Other good readings along these lines is How to Do Philosophy by Paul Graham and The Specificity Sequence by Liron.
A good (thought not perfect) definition of confidence is what odds you would bet on. That’s why so many readers of this website are interested in betting markets and the Kelly Criterion.
Pretty much anything can be right or wrong. It depends on the context. Murder is the deliberate killing of a human being in violation of the law. A French civilian killing an SS agent in 1943 constitutes murder, but is not an open-and-shut case of immorality.
The statement “murder is wrong” is too vague to assign a truth value to. It’s like saying “chemistry is immoral”. It depends what you’re using it for.
As for confidences…
Confidences like 100% and 99.99% are not fundamental physical things like protons and photons. They’re not even as concrete as cats and dogs. Confidences are abstractions created by people to make sense of the world we inhabit. A useful first step to unconfusing your disagreement with your friend might be to define exactly what you mean by “confidence”.
The best classes for overcoming shyness and becoming more social are called “improv comedy classes”. Unfortunately, improvisational comedy works best in-person. What can you do during this pandemic?
If the core problem is you are shy then that is straightforward to fix. Just do a bunch of low risk (to yourself and others) socially scary things like giving presentations, filming YouTube videos, writing a blog, writing complimentary emails to people you respect, etc. It doesn’t matter whether anyone watches or reads these things. The purpose is to decondition shyness and improve your communication skills. Eventually your brain will calibrate itself to the true low risk of social initiative. Pseudonyms are allowed.
If all you have read on this subject is Cialdini’s Influences then you have not yet exhausted the trove of useful literature.
If you want to be more social then the book to read is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
The basic book on negotiation for the purpose of career advancement is What Color Is Your Parachute?
My favorite book which puts all three topics together is Built, not Born by Tom Golisano.
I also like to ask for occasional mentorship from a senior engineer I trust and respect, but this option is not available to everyone.
We have a stock which returns 50% or −40%. If we put all our money in this stock, we are going to lose it over time since but on any given day, this stock has a positive expected return.
I like this example as a way of thinking about the problem.
I agree with the core thesis that, in a society under the rule of law, it’s a good heuristic to seek out rejection. There are many different ways to do cool things to do and cool people to meet. I am curious which vectors OP and other readers find the most useful and/or undervalued.
I’m writing this from Less Wrong 2.0.
I don’t know what Less Wrong 1.0 was like but I feel like Less Wrong 2.0 accomplishes this.
Once again, I don’t know what Less Wrong 1.0 was like, but I think Less Wrong 2.0 does a good job of this without incentivizing too much.