Understood. It might indeed be useful instrumentally. That being said, I’m not sure how I would be able to display a different confidence level than I felt without lying (I don’t lie). Is it something you say, or is it just your posture etc? Or is there something else?
masasin
You’re completely right here. I meant odds of 3:1 in general, as opposed to when they’re a complement. (Also, 90 + 30 is more than 100%.) I’ll edit it.
It’s only 75% and 25% when the sum of probabilities is 100%, but O(red car:green car) can be 3:1 when 60% of cars are red and 20% are green, or when 3% of cars are red and 1% are green. The remainder are different colours.
I’ll keep that in mind for next time. Thanks!
Thanks! I modified the post. Could you take a look?
I’m on long-term release Ritalin with instant-release, which is the most effective of the ones that are legal in Belgium (I moved 3 years ago). It makes almost zero difference other than my mouth is slightly drier.
So what would the procedure be for e.g., brushing teeth? I’ve done it thousands of times already. It’s still a conscious decision whenever I realize that I haven’t brushed my teeth in a while. Repeat a few times because e.g., I see something on the way to the bathroom so I go do something else, so brushing my teeth is delayed by another few hours/days.
I was trying to find something that helps me form something that doesn’t need any deliberative attention, though. Can you give an example of where it might be useful?
Quick explanation of the weeks. It’s not the first time you mention that.
The rest of the world uses this method of counting weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date.
Week 1 is the first week (starting on Monday) with the majority of its days in January. This year started on a Friday, so we only had 3 days in Jan in the week containing New Year. As a result, we ended up with 2020 having 53 weeks.
So, on the graph, Week 53 is Dec 28 to Jan 3, while Week 1 is Jan 4 to Jan 10. We’re currently in Week 10.
I was living on my own, but I locked down on 9 March. From when my SO had to leave the country on 21 March, to when I was kicked out of the country in Jan, the only person I had physical contact with was one hug on 20 September. The friend was on day 14 of her own quarantine. And when I finished the quarantine in the old/new country in Feb, that was the first time someone had seen my face in person since my SO.
I got my first ever car in Jan 2020 because I didn’t want to risk public transport. I bought lots of food and masks etc. I convinced my workplace to let everyone work from home if they wanted to (me!) a couple of weeks before the government lockdown. The last restaurant I went to was March 8 2020.
The major factors in my opinion were:
I don’t want to kill anyone by mistake, and most of the old people weren’t wearing masks properly. (And my literal next door neighbours were a very old couple who also didn’t wear their masks properly).
I don’t want long covid. If I get sick, I’m on my own. I lived alone, and I had zero family in the country. There would be nobody who would be able to help me if something happened. And my building had no elevator, so I’d need to climb up four flights of stairs while being out of breath for however long it took to convalesce.
Most people around me weren’t taking adequate precautions. I know many people who got COVID, but nobody who died from it.
Some differences from mingyuan:
I was okay with outdoors (in a forest) meetings with one (or possibly two) other people. That being said, that only happened a total of three times.
I was okay with going to further places (I finally had a car!), so long as I was away from people. I did a few same-day solo road trips (packed my own lunch and ate in the car), and lots of exploration (and virtual dates with my SO).
I did interact with others (e.g., groceries and some necessities.)
Some similarities:
When things started to open up (e.g., in the summer), people threw caution to the wind. Government allowed e.g. up to 10 people to meet in restaurants etc, so these were definitely out. People wouldn’t wear masks when outdoors even in large groups.
I did end up expanding my network of Rats (online) and learning a lot of things, though.
Right now, I’m staying with my younger sister, and she’s vaccinated because of her work, so yay. There’s a visa application in progress to see if I can return to the previous country, but when I go will depend on how accessible vaccinations are here vs there.
For now, I’m satisfied with what I did, and I think it was reasonable all things considered. One concern I have in the long term is that seeing crowds and unmasked people gets a visceral reaction, including e.g. in old movies. I’ll need to retrain myself, because I don’t want to end up with agoraphobia.
Did you cultivate the fear of cars on purpose? Why? Did you use to be able to drive before?
I got my license in 2010, but didn’t really drive until Feb last year. It took me a month to start the car up. It took me another 3 months to get on a highway, and 4 months after that until I was comfortable going on longer trips. Obviously COVID, so I had to teach myself for the most part. And I’m still relying on certain automations (e.g., sensors to make sure I don’t destroy things while backing up, adaptive cruise control to control my speed and distance, etc.) I’m not sure I would be able to drive something while controlling the speed with my foot.
Two tools I found extremely useful were my dashcam (front and rear) and Google Street View. At the start, I’d spend about 3 hours for each planned hour of trip reviewing the route on Street View, finding the different signs at each point and how the intersections were arranged, seeing what they look like from above, etc. And then after the trip I rewatched the entire thing to see my mistakes (and there were plenty of mistakes) and get advice (COVID, so I sent clips to friends and family who I think drive well).
Nowadays (or rather, until I left it in my previous country of residence), I do most of my planning with the Google Maps routing tool. I take a look at it with the satellite view, and use street view where I think it might be easy to get confused (e.g., multiple tight turns after each other, where the GPS might be delayed.) That takes me about 10 minutes per hour of driving (less for highway-heavy trips). For the highway, I review the exit names I should look out for whenever there’s a split or a merge or I need to take a certain lane. After the trip, I do a review for longer trips, but I batch the shorter ones (e.g., groceries) and do that once a month or so.
Back in Feb, I couldn’t even stay in lane. I’m still not quite satisfied with my spatial awareness of the size of my car, but I can offload it to the car, so that’s okay. That being said, I’m a much safer driver compared to before, I’m much better at anticipating things that would happen 5 to 10 seconds before they happen. I’ve had many highway trips where I don’t need to touch the accelerator or the brakes at all.
Another tip is to get things that increase your safety, such as blind spot mirrors if you don’t have them, hydrophilic coating for the mirrors, and hydrophobic coating for the windshield (for when it’s raining). And finally, use checklists! Things that you might forget, or things that would be dangerous not to have already done in case an emergency happens. It shouldn’t take more than two minutes (most days it’s about 40 seconds) to start the car, but I know that I have e.g. the sunglasses on my head for driving towards the sun (and I know which sections those are during those times because preplanning), I know that I didn’t forget a passenger, and all my items are stowed safely in case of a crash.
As for the dreams, most of them I don’t remember. The ones I do don’t tend to have (m)any other people, but I have had the “I forgot the mask (despite the checklist) == immediate isolation/return home (never happened btw)”, and the “there are so many evil (maskless) people around and no safe route!” before. I’m hoping for some things to catch on (e.g., I used to wear a mask when I was sick pre-pandemic and people would minimize it). I’ve never liked crowds in the first place, so smaller event sizes make me happier.
Didn’t really have much of a choice about #2. I was living alone, and didn’t want to househunt in the middle of a pandemic. Ended up living rent-free.
Assume you’re both infectious and vulnerable to infection.
I disagree with their #3. I’ve had a prior that I had an asymptomatic infection at less than the background rate of asymptomatic infections in the population in general. So, no symptoms would definitely not cause me to think I have been infected, unless I had more information (e.g., a test result). I certainly wouldn’t act as if I was immune. At the same time, the probability that I had been infected without symptoms was high enough that I always treated myself as infectious, just in case.
Even being conservative, I think 5% would be a big overestimate. When I was living on my own, it was less than 1%. When I moved in with my sister (who only interacts with people who keep their distance and take the same precautions she does), it went up a bit, and then went down a bit when she got vaccinated, because even if she would have increased her risk-taking, she’d be less likely to get infected, and less likely to be infectious, and, if she was infectious, it would be unlikely that my symptoms would be severe because of virus load.
(In the end, she tested negative, so...)
As for their #4, my symptoms (i.e., the cough) are already gone, and I didn’t notice a decrease in e.g. breath holding ability, energy levels, or anything like that. I think the no long covid for me is 80+%.
Until I get symptoms, the highest probability was that I hadn’t gotten COVID yet. On the other hand, even if there was a 1% chance that I was infectious (able to spread COVID to others) on any given day, it’s not high enough to warrant a test, which is uncomfortable, and expensive unless it was positive or I had a confirmed exposure. At the same time, it was high enough that e.g. my neighbours (80+ years old) or the person at the supermarket might get sick from it, and be hospitalized, not to mention the secondary effects, so I made sure to breathe slowly around people, and wear masks and keep my distance. Most of my communication ended up being gestures (and even then it was mostly “thank you!”) instead of words.
In other words, 99% chance that I’m vulnerable, take precautions to avoid getting infected if I’m not infected already. 1% risk of preventably murdering someone else, take precautions to avoid that consequence just in case I am infected already.
Which is still a huge probability. That being said, the precautions to prevent murdering others are exactly the same precautions that would reduce my probability of getting sick in the first place.
I started preparing in January. Bought my first ever car to avoid public transit, and bought emergency food and masks etc too. By the time China closed down Wuhan, I thought it was high double digits that a pandemic was inevitable. By the time the Diamond Princess happened and so many people on the ship got infected, it seemed likely that it was airborne (and the fact that SARS spread that way was an extra data point). I encouraged my SO to fly over because I didn’t think we’d be able to meet that year otherwise. (She ended up coming, but we were about a week too late for cohabitation, and she had to return.)
That being said, it’s still too early to stop wearing masks in most of the world. In most of the US, too, if that’s your metric. Even if prevalence is low where you are right now, depending on how many people are no longer (as) susceptible, you can still get huge numbers again. More than half of your states have less than 50% of the population vaccinated. Not to mention the variants that are much better at spreading compared to the baseline (which was relatively high to start with), which have an even higher herd immunity threshold.
As for me, I’m in Belgium, and I am still double masking. We’re starting to see another increase. Both the first and second derivatives are positive. But the government says it’s okay to do basically everything again so people are essentially acting as if COVID doesn’t exist. I haven’t even eaten in a restaurant since March last year.
I love Tasker, and it’s probably the major thing keeping me from switching to iOS. I’ve never used the scenes, but here are my two major profile groups:
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Tap an NFC tag in the car to toggle driving mode. Brightness and volume are set to an appropriate value, earphones are disconnected (with a reminder to remove them from my ears), forced connection to car Bluetooth (it doesn’t always connect if I don’t use Tasker), starts a 2-hour rest timer, automatically quiets alarms when they happen (once had 15 minutes on the highway before I could stop and turn it off), log the drive, start my driving checklist app (this can be a post of its own if anyone is interested), and opens up Maps. Turning off driving mode undoes everything, reminds me to take the earphones if I had them on when I started driving, stops logging the drive, and opens up the car shutdown checklist. Feature to add: Automatically save my parking. (I don’t do that yet because I add notes, especially underground.)
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A speaking calendar. Goes through all my calendars to figure out when the next event is, figures out which language the entry is written in, and reads it out loud when the event starts. (Most of my events are from home so there’s no commute/prep time involved.) Can handle overlapping events. Feature to add: Speak when there’s a reminder as well rather than just when the event starts, for when COVID is over. Bonus stuff include
Knowing my SO’s part-time job schedule, and reminding me to send her a do your best 30 minutes before she starts, as well as a welcome back when she finishes.
For events between the two of us, it automatically opens up the chat app we use.
Adds a walk every day starting 1.5 hours before sunset. Reminds me to prepare 30 minutes before the walk starts, and announces the weather 5 minutes before, and opens the weather app.
Nothing opens if I’m in driving mode.
Some standalone tasks:
Tells me good night and opens up the chat app to tell my SO good night as well. If she has a job while I’m asleep (7-8 hours time zone difference), it lets me know, so I can send her the do your best message before I go to sleep.
Flipping the phone upside down mutes the ringer.
Controlling lights
Interfacing with Google Assistant
A bunch of other small annoyances.
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I’m using Obsidian as well. IIRC there is an open source alternative that aims to work with Obsidian markdown files (with features still being added the last time I looked). I forgot what it’s called, though, and it doesn’t have the same plugin ecosystem either.
I don’t use focus mode for anything, though some apps are fullscreen by default.
Software: Tasker, to automate everything Android. Alternatives: Automate, IFTTT, Llama
More details on this post, including a comment of mine detailing things that my setup does. I’ll have some posts coming up as well, regarding Tasker and checklisting to drive.
But the point is, it’s extremely powerful and flexible. There are also a bunch of plugins (some free, some paid), that expand it even more. With Termux, for example, you can even write regular Python programs to do complicated stuff as well. Pretty much anything I needed to do, I was able to do, and I keep discovering new things. You can even make pretty GUIs to go along with that!
This is the first Android app that I ever bought (and remained the only one for half a decade).
One disadvantage is that the intents system is hard to figure out in case you want to use it (I don’t use it), and another is that some of the external plugins don’t really scale well in terms of having variables set in Tasker. But it’s still a very strong rec from me.
In the context of this post, your confidence in your absolute skill is the same.
When interviewing, you’re comparing yourself to people who have applied (the fact that you got an interview indicates that you might be more suitable than most of the applicants), and maybe to the other interviewees too.
When you start the new job, on the other hand, your relative skill is probably about the same, but your instrumental skill is much lower than the other employees’ because you don’t know the systems/tools/jargon that the company uses. You’d need to learn new things, ask questions, and get feedback to get up to speed.