Morpheus

• Morpheus 21 Jul 2021 21:01 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ran­dom­ized Zet­telkas­ten Test

  Interesting!

  My experience has been very different so far.

  I want to see if I’ve hit diminishing returns or if original insights are still available with this method.

  I am not sure what exactly you try to achieve by cutting down on the number of nodes. Are you dissatisfied with the number of connections you make between your notes or do you feel that the method is losing its novelty for you?

  For me, coming up with connections is easy. Noticing connections between different ideas feels really rewarding, and this is the main reason it has stuck with me so far. Cutting down becomes the hard part. Principles/​heuristics for note-taking, like “in what context do I want to see this again?”, have helped me with that. But it might also be that this effect is mostly due to me using this method for only 3 months, and the novelty will wear off eventually.

• Morpheus 26 May 2021 2:54 UTC

  1 point

  on: Why are peo­ple so bad at dat­ing?

  For example, we know that people systematically choose unattractive images for their dating profiles. Sites like PhotoFeeler cheaply (in some cases, freely) resolve this problem.

  Nice. I didn’t know about this. I am going to test some high-risk pictures that I was hesitant to put on my profile for a while.

  
  I also had to think of this Post about dating from Putanumonit:

  First, the data. The most important post on OkTrends explains that women get a lot more messages if guys differ wildly in assessing their appearance, i.e. if some guys think they’re super hot and some guys think they’re unseemly, with no in-between. I looked at speed dating data from Columbia University and confirmed the effect for both men and women. When controlling for average rating of attractiveness, the variance in ratings correlated strongly with more people wanting to date you.

  So not optimizing for average likableness might actually be in your interest when dating.

• Morpheus 7 May 2021 20:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Turns out I had been too optimistic with this. I did not realize at the time that I would also have to pay transaction fees for claiming my money later. I also procrastinated on getting my money back for a long while, because I needed to add more funds to my account in order to pay for the transaction costs. In the end I payed another ~150$ in gas fees.

• Morpheus 31 Mar 2021 9:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: chlorophos’s comment on: De­sign 2

  On Firefox I’d recommend tridactyl if you want more features. Though it definitely has a steeper learning curve. So if tridactyl seems overwhelming you might as well use Vimium which has all the shortcuts I use ~98% of the time.

• Morpheus 17 Jan 2021 10:30 UTC

  1 point

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of hid­ing Ein­stein’s pen for fifty years

  First get some special case for the pen so it will survive any of the scenarios.

  1. Bury it very deep underground

  2. Eat it

  3. Get it transplanted between your organs.

  4. Move to china and get a new identity

  5. Put it into the sword handle of your decorational sword on your wall

  6. Shoot it into orbit.

  7. Get a save at a bank.

  8. Build your own castle to defend the pen.

  9. Paint the pen in a different color. No one will notice it is the same pen.

  10. Make it invisible

  11. Give it to your friend you really trust.

  12. Hide the pen for 30 years and then give it to the child Albert Einstein so he can come up with his results 20 years early.

  13. Send it to Albert Einsteins mother, so she can protect it.

  14. Throw it into the ocean and hope the tides will bring it back 50 years later

  15. Put it between your couch cushions.

  16. Put it inside one of your couch cushions.

  17. Lend it to a museum for 50 years and tell them about the importance of the pen. No one will expect that you put the pen on display for everyone.

  18. Give the pen to Maxwell, so he can come up with relativity instead.

  19. Tell your son to come up with a solution. You fear you won’t be there in 50 years to protect the pen.

  20. Hide it in an old tree.

  21. Bring the pen to the Vatican and ask the pope to hide the pen for you in some special save?

  22. Glue it to the ceiling of your appartment.

  23. Hide the pen inside an art gallery with the Text: “This is not a pen” written under the display.

  24. Put it into your pocket

  25. Give it to a pen collector to hide it between his other pens.

  26. Try really hard to remember what you learned about physics in the future and come up with the Einsteins work instead.

  27. put it into a chest and tell someone that it contains something really important.

  28. Send it to your parents.

  29. Examine it very closely. Maybe you are able to transfer its power to other pens.

  30. Become really good at making pens, so you can give Albert Einstein another pen that is just as good.

  31. Hide it in a mine

  32. Found a cult around the pen that will be able to protect it against those evil forces.

  33. Go to iceland and hide it in the snow.

  34. Go to the Sahara and hide it in the sand.

  35. Hide it inside of a book you don’t like.

  36. get a really high tower and hide it on the roof. no one will dare to go there

  37. Hide it inside of some indiana Jones Temple

  38. It’s 1855? Put it under your hat.

  39. Hide it on a yet undiscovered Island.

  40. Put it so deep under water that it can only be retrieved with technology after 1900

  41. Put it into a secret pocket of your jacket.

  42. Give it to powerful authorities of your country of residence

  43. Give it to a construction worker to hide it in a wall.

  44. Put it into the Lascaux cave. It won’t be discovered for more then 80 years.

  45. Close your Eyes so you can’t see it.

  46. throw it real high and hope it does only come back in 50 years.

  47. Put it into your wallet

  48. Invent the Radio and send a signal to aliens to take the pen on there spaceship.

  49. Hide a fake copy of the pen in an obvious hiding place and keep the real one always with you.

  50. Make 50 copies of the pen and hide all of them in seperate locations. Only you know where you hid the original one.

• Morpheus 4 Jan 2021 17:59 UTC

  1 point

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of send­ing some­thing to the moon

  Really love the idea of having more exercise/​dojo-posts. I discovered this challenge a little late and then I put it off, but I always meant to come back:

  1. rocket

  2. slingshot

  3. gun

  4. trampoline

  5. giant swing

  6. giant vacuum pipe (I believe to have read about something like that on xkcd to bring water to mars)

  7. throw it with your arms

  8. “something” includes light, so you can send light to the moon using a small laser or a flashlight

  9. build a tower/​space elevator

  10. grow a tree

  11. use your magic wand

  12. balloon

  13. make a bridge out of legos

  14. fly up there with your magic wings

  15. get the moon to you → get the moon out of its current orbit and crash it into the earth (or just get it closer)

      1. throw a big rock to get the moon out of its orbit

      2. use a giant laser to get the moon out of its orbit

      3. pull the moon toward the earth with a giant string

      4. Turn the earth into a giant magnet and pull the moon toward you.

      5. wait for the tides to pull the moon closer to you, then throw.

      6. frown at the moon hard enough to make it complacent then let it smash into earth

  16. throw it through a wormhole

  17. use a solar sail

  18. trick yourself into believing you made it to the moon

  19. rebuild the moon on earth

  20. smash a giant meteor into the earth, so that some debris reaches the moon

  21. pay Nasa/​SpaceX to brainstorm for you

  22. use a giant hook

  23. put a small stone on top of an atomic bomb

  24. make an icecream tower

  25. freeze the seas and make a giant jumping hill

  26. water a plant and let it grow until it grows toward the moon

  27. genetically engineer a frog to jump to the moon from mount Everest.

  28. throw many tomatoes hard enough to accelerate yourself toward the moon

  29. build a giant ice bridge toward the moon

  30. frown at the moon hard enough to ma

  31. tell your hamster about it

  32. find the strongest human you can find and let him throw a juggling ball

  33. use a pencil as a catapult

  34. use something with negative mass to launch it to the moon

  35. wait for future generations/​superintelligence to find a cheap way to do it for you

  36. build a particle accelerator with the radius of the earth with a small hole to throw particles to the moon

  37. wait for the neutrinos of your nuclear fusion reactor to reach the moon

  38. become the leader of your country and start a space program

  39. turn mount Everest into jelly and throw something on it

  40. build a giant rollercoaster

  41. make a tornado/​typhoon/​some other big wind thingy

  42. put it into a volcano

  43. use an enormous ventilator

  44. travel back in time when the moon and the earth were still one and put your thing at the right spot so it will be at the moon in the present

  45. use venus or mars as a gravity slingshot

• Morpheus 20 Dec 2020 10:26 UTC

  3 points

  on: What are your great­est one-shot life im­prove­ments?

  I feel very drowsy in the morning, if I get woken up by an alarmsound or vibration. Buying a light alarm clock has largely solved this problem for me. I wake up before the alarm rings about 80% of the time. It does not work that well if I am sleep deprived.

  The main advantages for me are: I wake up more often before my alarm rings and the light is an immediate cue that it is time to wake up.

  They are relatively expensive, but from browsing Amazon for 2 minutes I get the impression that you can get pretty good ones for 30-50$ (I personally bought one for ~60$).

Chance that “AI safety ba­si­cally [doesn’t need] to be solved, we’ll just solve it by de­fault un­less we’re com­pletely com­pletely care­less”

• Morpheus 5 Dec 2020 21:06 UTC

  1 point

  on: [Math] Towards Proof Writ­ing as a Skill In Itself

  This confirms my experience so far. I tried to read Naive Set Theory, but after like 3 chapters I realized that the author already expects me to know how proofs work. I used the book How to prove it by Daniel J. Velleman to learn how to write proofs. I cannot say whether this is the best book out there, but it is definitely useful for self-study. It has a lot of exercise problems after every section and solutions for 30-50% of them. I went through roughly half of the book. I am currently taking linear algebra and real analysis in university and I feel more comfortable about the class than a lot of my classmates.

• Morpheus 30 Oct 2020 22:23 UTC

  4 points

  on: Des­per­a­tion ham­ster wheels

  The example with the book reasonated with me. I am currently trying to get better at math and writing proofs and in the beginning I used to feel pretty good about myself and my progress while I was studying. Now I have gotten to a point where I have a harder time with the problems in my book and I feel like my progress is slowing down. I don’t know if that is actually the case, but I have started to get stressed out about it.

• Morpheus 26 Oct 2020 14:51 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: philip_b’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  You can use catnip which is built on Augur. Here is a blogpost from the guy who made it and a Discord Channel where you can ask questions when you get stuck.

• Morpheus 19 Oct 2020 7:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Ok so I am through the process of making an account and adding funds to it. You have to transfer your money into the Cryptocurrency DAI. The bet with the lowest fees and the longest expiration date (to allow for a longer time until the results are known), has Trump at 62%. The cheapest NO-share that you can buy immediately is at .69. There is a 0.77% market fee. But there is a relatively high fee for making a transaction which is payed in Ethereum. it currently costs the equivalent of around 10$. But this transaction doesn’t scale with your bet, so if you already plan to make a large bet (>500$) this shouldn’t affect your decision much.

• Morpheus 18 Oct 2020 22:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Ok you don’t need Etherum. You can just buy Augur’s currency using a credit card. I tried using coinbase, but it seems to have pretty high exchange fees.

• Morpheus 18 Oct 2020 22:06 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  You could try using Augur using a VPN I think. Though you need Cryptocurrency (Etherum). Which is the reason I didn’t use it so far (too much effort to set up).

• Morpheus 7 Aug 2020 22:35 UTC

  2 points

  on: Mor­pheus’s Shortform

  Summary: I have updated on being more conscientious than I thought.

  Since most of the advice on 80.000 hours is aimed at high performing college students, I find it difficult how much this advice should apply to myself, who just graduated from high school. Previously I had thought of myself as talented in math (I was the best in my class with 40 students, since first grade), but mid- to below average in conscientiousness. I also feel slightly ashamed of my (hand-)writing: most of my teachers commented that my texts were too short and my writing is not exactly pretty. I was diagnosed with ADHD with eleven and even with medication, my working memory is pretty bad. Even though I have started to develop strategies to cope with my disabilities, I wasn’t sure how I was doing compared to those classmates that performed better in writing. So I just assumed that they must be way more productive. Recently I thought it would be interesting to try to predict my final grades by predicting the grades for every subject using Guesstimate (Unfortunately I later put in the grades I got in the end without saving my initial model. If someone is interested I can try to recreate it). This proved to be more useful then I thought: It was a major update for me being more productive and conscientious compared to the rest of my class.

  • Together with another student, I got the highest grades in German (my native tongue) in my final exam (13 out of 15 points), because I practiced writing (Exams).

  • I think I would not have realized that I had false assumptions about my performance if I had not seen the difference (There were 3-4 additional students in my class who I thought would be better than me in the final exam) between my prediction and the outcome.

  • It is not like I was bad before in German, but I attributed a lot of the credit to my teacher liking me. Since a second teacher graded my final exam, this effect shouldn’t be as great.

Mor­pheus’s Shortform

• Morpheus 15 Jul 2020 12:11 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ret­ro­spec­tive on a quan­ti­ta­tive pro­duc­tivity log­ging attempt

  Thanks for your post! I also tried to track my productivity and mood (to get better about reflection and to track the impact of adhd medication) in my journal until I got frustrated with how much these metrics seemed to shift over time when I reviewed them in retrospect. It could be my memory that tricks me, but I think at some point, I slipped into the habit of rating my mood for the day as a 4 just because I didn’t take enough time to reflect (my scale goes from 1-5). I also think that the ratings were much more influenced by how I felt in the evening. Descriptions like the ones in your post could make this problem less bad: descriptions along the lines of “4: feeling neutral for most of the day, but 2 hours that were very nice” (I’ll have to think about this scale more) might make this work for me again.