I would like to encourage this!
Alternative representations for a larger audience could be
cartoons explaining a single concept, like XKCD or Dilbert.
graphical overviews, like the cognitive bias cheatsheet.
What else would be feasible?
I would like to encourage this!
Alternative representations for a larger audience could be
cartoons explaining a single concept, like XKCD or Dilbert.
graphical overviews, like the cognitive bias cheatsheet.
What else would be feasible?
Goodday! I’ve been reading rationalist blogs for approximately 2 years. At this random moment I have decided to make a LessWrong account.
Like most human beings I suffer and struggle in life. As a rich human, like most LessWrong users I assume (we have user stats?), I suffer in luxury.
The main struggle is where to spend my time and energy. The opportunity cost of life I suppose. What I do:
Improve myself. My thinking, my energy, my health, my wealth, my career, my status.
Improve my nearest relationships.
Improve my community (a bit).
Improve the world (a tiny bit).
But alas, the difficulty, how to choose the right balance? Hopefully I am doing better as I go along. Though how do I measure that?
I have no intellectual answers for you I am afraid. I’ll let you know if I find them.
Current status: Europe, 30+ years, 2 kids, physics PhD (bit pointless, but fun), AI/ML related work in high tech hardware company, bicycle to work, dabbled some in social entrepreneurship (failure).
I read my first anti-news manifesto about 10 years ago and the meme immediately clicked with me. Haven’t gone back ever since, my close family, friends and colleagues inform me of relevant news.
I haven’t been able to convince many others though. So I guess I’ll just salute you, fellow meme spreader.
This reminds me of Left Brain, Right Stuff. It also has content on how overconfidence helps athletes perform something like 4% better, which is a big deal in a relative competition where small differences can make you win or lose. He then continues to find business analogies.
Always lovely such practical advice.
By the way, if you can live so close to work that you can cycle or walk to it, you can combine a lot of great things: more excercise, less commuting, more money. If you can then commute together with coworkers, even better.
This closely relates to the concept of black swan farming.
The typical argument I’ve read is that we should take more risk, because risk taking widens the distribution and gives us more probability of ending up in the tail.
However, blind risk taking widens the distribution symmetrically. So we need to find ways to increase the positive tail probability, while taking more risk. You propose ‘weak ties’ and ‘virtue’ as a solution.
I’m going to take the leap and assume you mean virtue signaling, or any other form of signaling that makes you look like a good ally. With such signaling, others will be more likely to become your ally and help you out when you undertake your risky venture. This would increase your probability of success. Doing the opposite would reduce your probability (decay your upside).
As I grow older I spend more and more time teaching. I can concur with all points in this post. Sadly it contained no diagrams.
Diagrams are truly awesome. Great diagrams are absolutely amazing. High level summary diagrams are the best. I spend most of my time at work now drawing and explaining diagrams.
I inspired someone; yay!
Since I like profound discussions I am now going to have to re-read IFS, it didn’t fully resonate with me the first time.
I cannot come up with such a cool wolverine story I am afraid.
Thanks for taking the time to transparantly writing down your approach. I’m spending more and more time optimizing developer effectiveness at work, so posts like this may help me in my own behavior.
Thanks Lsusr, thinking back there was a post where you asked people to “pick up the glove” and you mentioned people hardly do. It helped kick me out of my passivity. I’m not sure I can be as risk seeking as you have been in life, but I’m trying to create more instead of just consuming.
Hah, the polarization effect explains why I always go into important meetings with sufficient number of allies. But unfortunately that’s a way to manipulate the decision making, not to actually make better decisions.
I also recognize this feeling of “You have not done enough” or worse “This goal was meaningless in hindsight”. It’s probably very instrumental, pushing us and our genes to ever greater heights.
So should we lean in to it? Accepting happiness is forever lost behind some horizon? You will just walk around with this internal nagging feeling.
Or should we fix this bug as you say, but risk stagnation? One way may be to become a full-time meditating monk. Then you may have a chance to turn your wetware into a personal nirvana untill you pop out of existence. But that feels meaningless as well.
I’m trying to find a blend; take the edge off the suffering while moving forward.
May I ask why you think you “passively consume” LW content? I notice the same behavior in myself, so I’m curious.
P.S. I hope it’s still better than passively consuming most other media.
Woah, thanks for your confirmation.
I’ll admit it’s a constant struggle. This smartphone is both a blessing and a curse.
Did you ever follow those guided meditation apps? It’s all about recognizing you are distracted and moving back to your breath or some other concentration excercise.
Well, I try to catch myself in the act of avoiding boredom. Reaching to my phone. Or opening some social media app. Or even going to read LessWrong. Those are cues. Instead I now stare out the window a bit, accepting the boredom, doing a micro-meditation. Or I start writing a small note about some topic. I tried a Babble just now. But afterwards I looked up that babble link, got distracted by the LessWrong notifications and here we are, replying to your comment.
Ok, I am going to go back now. But I’ll think about this a bit as well.
Well this is quite a tantalizing introduction.
On reflection I do this too on occasions. If it helps you then it’s great, right?
Also there is a whole literature about the meditation posture. If you are prone to falling asleep while lying down you should consider sitting. But if you are a high energy individual then a reclining posture can actually help. Don’t feel bad about what works well for you after experimentation.
As another commenter noted, there exists an alternative strategy. Which is to organize a lot of one-on-one meetings to build consensus. And then to use a single group meeting to demonstrate that consensus and polarizing the remaining minority. This may be a more efficient way to enforce cooperation.
Anyway, I wonder if there is a good method to find out the dominant forces at play here.
May I ask why you choose Rust to write math and algorithms? I would have chosen Julia :p
How about another angle.
Most meetings are not just power games. They are pure status games. Only in such group meetings can you show off. Power plays are one way to show off.
You will speak quickly and confidently, while avoiding to make any commitment to action. If you attend someone else’s meeting, you quickly interrupt and share your arguments in order to look confident and competent.
The low status meeting participants are mainly there to watch. They will try to quickly join the highest status viewpoints to avoid loss of more status, thereby causing cascades. As high status person you can deflect actions and delegate actions to a low status participant, thereby further boosting your status.
Being seen as the one who made the decision is nice. Deliberately delaying a decision by arguing for more data is also fine. Visibly polarizing an audience to your viewpoint is an amazing status spectable!
Most meetings are status games. They are boring for the low status participants who have little chance to gain status. But these meetings are what keeps the high status participants going. And it’s an opportunity for careerists to grow in status. All decision making and cooperation is irrelevant or a side-effect.