Metus

Karma: 2,483

Metus Dec 25, 2014, 12:17 AM
5 points
in reply to: Andy_McKenzie’s comment on: 2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Personally it sems that number of commits is a metric too easy to game. If you generally are honest with yourself, keep it, but I wouldn’t use it if I were to set a goal for a group of students. Another metric that is less easy to game on a personal level is time spent with your programming environment open, which is effective if you tend to either not start programming or stop prematurely. Finally the ideal metric is to have a set of features or a certain output you want to achieve and have that as a goal with the caveat that these goals tend to be too hard to achieve in the mean time.

So overall, I’d recommend time spent programming as a weekly goal and a final product as an overarching goal with the explicit option of re-negotiation.

Metus Dec 25, 2014, 12:12 AM
4 points
in reply to: Andy_McKenzie’s comment on: 2015 New Years Resolution Thread

Great list! Hope you don’t mind a couple of questions.

Thanks! There would be little point in posting to a discussion board if I wasn’t expecting discussion.

Any particular reason to donate to Wikipedia? I ask because I just read this interesting article about Wikimedia donations that was posted on the FB EA thread a few days ago.

Until a few minutes ago I thought that people would on average not donate enough to Wikipedia enough. Actually, my thought was more like “Wikipedia was so useful in the past and I expect it to be useful in the future too, so I could donate a small amount to make up for my use.” But I am revising that thought as we speak. The larger point anyhow was to signal that I am not completely sold on effective altruism and might also donate to the Red Cross or so.

Also, how many applications per month?

I have until the end of this year to decide. A modest goal would be one per week, but it would be way more effective if I make the rate dependent on time and domain. So let’s say—and let me say that this won’t be the final number—one per week for stuff in industry that is not seasonal and an adjusted number for seasonal stuff.

Metus Dec 24, 2014, 11:45 PM
8 points
on: 2015 New Years Resolution Thread
My list of goals, nice habits to have and general goodness tends to grow in length instead of shrinking for various reasons but I can make progress anyhow in implementing it. Also I know that having way too many goals at once is harmful, so here’s the obvious caveat: This is a general list and brainstorming so far, with no real plan for realiable implementation, so take the goals, the length of the list and the commentary with the proverbial grain of salt. (Legend: “I vow” is certain, “I will” actually means “maybe”)
- Charity: There has been a delay in forming my contract for my student’s job and thus also a delay in payment, which made me think about money a lot more than usual. Since for various reasons my cashflow will improve I hereby vow to donate 1% of my income below the taxation threshold and 10% of any income beyond that to a mix of GiveWell, CFAR, MIRI and Wikipedia of my choosing.
- Health and charity: The weird case where self-interest and the public interest coincide applies for three things I have in mind
  - I will donate blood at least once in 2005. Of course I’ll donate 10% of the remuneration I get.
  - I will get all my vaccinations up-to-date and take any additional as recommended by my physician. Maybe the payment from above will subsidise a shot not covered by insurance. One prick for another.
  - I will take a course and certification in first aid. It might just be one of my dearest people I can help or just the occasional stranger.
- Education: No university and no school can offer comprehensive education, it has to come from many sources.
  - I tried audiobooks via Audible for the first time less than a month ago and I was amazed. At 10€ per audiobook it is quite a bargain and ideal for any non-fiction book with low information density like biographies. So I will listen through at least one audiobook per month, totaling twelve (12) books consumed in 2015.
  - Though this will happen at university, it still gets to the same heading. I will start learning Spanish and get at least to A1 level as I am currently pre-occupied learning Russian and developing a general love for languages.
  - Speaking of learning languages, as this is very fact-heavy and I start seeing the benefits of SRS, I will use Anki every single day instead of clusters of ten interspersed with pauses of a couple of days.
- Travel: This might just as well put this under the education heading, but it deserves its own spot. I will travel to at least one country I have not yet set foot in, alone. Since I live in Germany, the bar is relatively low, but this is one goal that tends to fuel itself.
- Interviewing: I will send out applications for part-time jobs, internships and stipends. Since I can control the material I send but not the answers I receive, the goal is set to the former. For far too long I have ignored the usual advice of getting at least one of each in internships, stipends, part-time-jobs and maybe a year/half-year abroad so I am looking for ways to fix that. The most obvious is to send out applications like crazy. This obviously ties into the points education and travel.
Some ideas I had before but I am unsure of in the face of total workload are to subscribe to a higher quality publication like the Economist and read at least one article every week or to read at least one book per month in addition to the audiobooks from above.

[Short, Meta] Should open threads be more frequent?

MetusDec 18, 2014, 11:41 PM

5 points

26 comments1 min readLW link

Metus Dec 18, 2014, 11:38 PM
2 points
in reply to: Ritalin’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Exercise.

But more seriously, try asking this again in the next open thread, this one seems flooded.

Metus Dec 16, 2014, 11:19 AM
1 point
in reply to: Rick_from_Castify’s comment on: Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book “The Sequences”
I don’t, sorry, that’s why I was asking. Sometimes publishers have unreasonable delays when publishing in other jurisdictions than the US because of licencing problems but that should not be a problem if all participants agree.

Metus Dec 16, 2014, 2:52 AM
0 points
in reply to: Rick_from_Castify’s comment on: Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book “The Sequences”

Audible

Will it be available globally?

Metus Dec 16, 2014, 2:42 AM
1 point
on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Reduced consumption of animal products, more specifically meat should help my health and both my purse and the global poor through reduced food prices. For reducing meat consumption in general it seems easy to just replace meat in a lot of dishes with cheese or substitute meaty dishes with some scrambled eggs. What can I do for variety? I am especially looking for cheap, fast and/or convenient methods to put together a meal. I am very willing to trade off fast for the other two as I can listen to audiobooks or similar while preparing food.

Metus Dec 16, 2014, 1:15 AM
2 points
in reply to: ausgezeichnet’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Also the German name suggests European location which means that fraternities are pretty much dead around here.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 10:21 PM
2 points
in reply to: Punoxysm’s comment on: Has LessWrong Ever Backfired On You?
A joke.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 2:45 AM
1 point
in reply to: Nisan’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
The theoretical question still stands.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 1:19 AM
21 points
in reply to: Metus’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one’s principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski’s litany.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 1:17 AM
2 points
in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Interesting answer. Seeing as my personal giving is completely out of pleasure not some kind of moral obligation, the argument for diversification is very strong.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 12:27 AM
14 points
on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
I am looking to set a morning routine for myself and wanted to hear if you have some unusual component in your morning routine other people might benefit from.

Metus Dec 15, 2014, 12:25 AM
1 point
on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
I want to open up the debate again whether to split donations or to concentrate them in one place.

One camp insists on donating all your money to a single charity with the highest current marginal effectiveness. The other camp claims that you should split donations for various reasons ranging from concerns like “if everyone thought like this” to “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” My position is firmly in the second camp as it seems to me obvious that you should split your donations just as you split your investments, because of risk.

But it is not obvious at all. If a utility function is concave risk aversion arises completely naturally and with it all the associated theory of how to avoid unnecessary risk. Utilitarians however seem to consider it natural that the moral utility function is completely linear in the number of people or QALYs or any other measure of human well-being. Is there any theoretical reason risk-aversion can arise if a utility function is completely linear in the way described before?

In the same vein, there seems to be no theoretical reason for having time preference in a certain world. So if we agree that we should invest our donations and donate them later it seems like there is no reason to actually donate them at any time since at any such time we could follow the same reasoning and push the donation even further. Is the conlcusion then to either donate now or not at all? Or should the answer be way more complicated involving average and local economic growth and thus the impact of money donated now or later?

Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good, but this rabbit hole seems to go deeper and deeper.

Metus Dec 13, 2014, 12:06 AM
7 points
in reply to: devi’s comment on: Harper’s Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum
US Americans are overly obsessed with hygiene from the point of view of the average European.

Metus Dec 11, 2014, 9:20 PM
9 points
on: Estimating the cost-effectiveness of research
This is an extremely important question to ask and to research, not to speak of answering it properly. It complements the EA community very nicely and can then help to answer questions like “Should I donate to GiveWell or MIRI?” I am very interested in your results.

Metus Dec 11, 2014, 9:16 PM
3 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book “The Sequences”
If the ebook is available at a reasonable price on the Amazon store Germany I’ll buy a copy. If not I’ll be waiting for the hardcopy version which I’ll buy anyhow.

Metus 11 Dec 2014 21:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book “The Sequences”
Then I’ll be waiting for it to appear in the Audible catalogue, assuming it will be available world-wide, specifically Germany. As a student $50 is way too much, especially since I want to get the hard copy in addition, but €10 (about $13) is quite realistic.

Metus 8 Dec 2014 12:19 UTC
16 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

Physics: “what is energy?”

I am a graduate student of physics and I am inclined to say that I now know even less about what energy is.

Metus

[Short, Meta] Should open threads be more fre­quent?

[Short, Meta] Should open threads be more frequent?