“Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out… In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.”—Paul Graham
mingyuan
Karma: 7,277
How to do a digital declutter
“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter
Digital intentionality is not about productivity
Digital intentionality: What’s the point?
Why does everything feel so urgent?
Relearning how to be human
A sonnet, a sestina, a villanelle
Two easy digital intentionality practices
Willpower is exhausting, use content blockers
Digital minimalism is out, digital intentionality is in
What are you excited about doing?
Build the life you actually want
A glimpse of the other side
You’re always stressed, your mind is always busy, you never have enough time
The impossible problem of due process
[Context: For ~4 years up until a year ago it was my job to keep track of rationalist groups around the world, also I happen to have gone to UChicago]
I don’t know of any other currently active rationality groups at universities, but I recommend joining this Discord server for people who run rationality meetups. Some of the organizers in there previously ran university groups, and even those who didn’t will probably have helpful advice.
For UChicago in particular, you probably already know this but you’ll need to apply for RSO status before December 1st. Without this you won’t be able to even book rooms, and that’s annoying because even if you successfully apply in this cycle you won’t have active RSO status until the spring. If UChicago still has an EA group that’s an official RSO, I recommend asking them for help with booking rooms in the meantime.
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
Here’s my take: From the inside, Nate feels like he is incapable of not becoming very frustrated, even angry. In a sense this is true. But this state of affairs is in fact a consequence of Nate not being subject to the same rules as everybody else.
I think I know what it’s like, to an extent — I’ve had anger issues since I was born, and despite speaking openly about it to many people, I’ve never met anyone who’s been able to really understand the feeling of being overwhelmed with rage (especially not as an adult). That feeling can be very hard to control.
However, I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
Whoops very late reply but in the pictures, the posters are actually just taped to 8.5“x10” sheets of black cardstock; after printing the virtues themselves we manually cut them all down to have 1/2″ margins all around.
When we moved houses in 2019 we did frame them, using these frames that conveniently come in a 12 pack! (For the void we put a piece of black paper in the frame.)
Agree! Also, my response to the sentence you quoted would be: Playing guitar and playing piano are (for many people) almost entirely separate skills, which feel very different, are learned differently, and have different cultural connotations. People are more likely to base their choice of instrument on that (and the things TAG mentioned) than on some kind of optimization for ‘most versatile musical instrument’.
But also I don’t disagree with the original quote :) I mean, it definitely seems true that a lot of people play the piano and guitar, fewer (but still many) play slightly less versatile things like violin and saxophone or other strummed instruments like banjo, not very many play piccolo or tuba, and almost no one plays theremin or very culturally specific instruments like bagpipes or shamisen (outside of the culture they’re specific to).
(I’m rarely online but for the record) I agree that the last section is weak and specifically agree with all of the points you made in this comment, including agreeing with the observation that exile from the community can ruin people’s lives.