Just another Bay Area Singulatarian Transhumanist Libertarian Rationalist Polyamor-ish coder & math nerd. My career focuses on competitive governance; personally I’m very into personal development (“Inward & upward”); lately I’ve gotten super into cultivation novels because I want to continuously self-improve until my power has grown to where I can challenge the very heavens to protect humanity.
patrissimo
Karma: 1,683
Statistical models & the irrelevance of rare exceptions
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s keyboard only has two keys: 1 and 0.
The speed of light used to be much lower before Eliezer Yudkowsky optimized the laws of physics.
Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t have a chin, underneath his beard is another brain.
As a contrarian rationalist, I can assure you that my attitudes are the results of my personality & upbringing, not some bold brave conscious decision. I was always different, enough that conforming wouldn’t have worked, so finding true & interesting & positive-attention-capturing ways to be different was my best path. The result is that I’m biased towards contrarian theses, which I think is useful for improving group rationality in most cases, but still isn’t rational.
I am starting to believe that Patri is motivated by status and worldly accomplishment much more than by learning or curiosity, and if Patri is indeed (as this article suggests) forgoing opportunities to take pleasure in learning for the sake of optimizing his increases in status or accomplishment, well, then even though Patri certainly is a fine and commendable young man, that is a mistake
Yes, I am indeed attempting to choose my reading based on how it supports my consciously chosen goals, rather than simply the vague non-goal of “learning” or short-term hedonic utility (“pleasure”). There is a name for this—it’s called “instrumental rationality”, and I’m rather surprised to find an LW commenter calling it a mistake! I thought I could count on it as a shared assumption.
Now, the question of what I’m motivated by & whether that’s good is totally separate. I frankly admit that one of my goals is to climb the status ladder, and I can understand why some people might not see that as desirable. On the other hand, I’m again surprised to find “worldly accomplishment” characterized negatively—isn’t accomplishing things in the world the point of...everything?
Curiosity is fun for kids, but the world ain’t gonna save itself.
I use audio books / podcasts some, but I don’t run, have a minimal commute, and so don’t end up getting much time in.
I’m pretty good at getting rid of the worst things, still trying to figure out what the best things are.
I see, that makes sense. I find it easiest to prioritize within a domain like “books”, vs. among all possible skill-increasing activities. Also, when it comes to “generally increasing my knowledge / improving my map”, that is something that I think it makes sense to allocate a fixed bucket of time to, although one should also compare alternatives like documentaries, blogs, and conversations as ways of doing it.
I personally know many people who have made those figures in the past, although high-stakes online poker has gotten much tougher in the past few years and it takes extremely high skill to make that much now.
I have personally made about $240/hr at online poker ($200 NLH SNGs on Party Poker back before the UIGEA). But I couldn’t make anywhere near that nowadays.
200 hours is 1 month of 50 hour weeks, or 2 months of 25 hour weeks. Is it really that big a deal for your results to only matter month to month rather than day to day? I mean, yeah, it can be frustrating during a bad week, but it’s not like the long run takes years.
I agree with most of this, but I don’t think it dilutes the brand to focus on our comparative advantage, namely highlighting the aspects of poker most relevant to rationality training.
Thanks for mentioning Tommy—I should ask him if he wants to make any guest posts.
Once a prioritization system is set up, it’s then trivial to decide whether to read the top book or do something else based on how your estimate of the value of doing so compares to your alternative activities. Without a prioritization system, it doesn’t matter whether you have fixed an amount of time or not—there are vastly more books to read than anyone has time in 8,760 hours per year, so you must prioritize.
So prioritization gets you flexible reading time, flexible reading time doesn’t get you prioritization, so I don’t see how pointing it out is relevant. Prioritization is an independent need. Please explain.
More generally, you seem to be assuming that one can instantly evaluate, without conscious prioritization, what the optimal activity is at any given time. I know that is not even slightly true for me, and I highly doubt it is true for you.
It seems odd that you are criticizing the site for not replicating the specific hand discussion which is done so well elsewhere, while simultaneously wondering how we will differentiate.
Obviously, we will differentiate by not writing about the topics which are written about elsewhere ad nauseam, and instead add new thoughts, not often written about, and likely to be of interest to this audience—namely the connections between poker & becoming more rational. Perhaps these new thoughts are not as fundamental for learning how to win at poker, but they are different, and we believe, useful.
Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books
FYI: Rumor says the plan for the South Bay meetup is to experiment with a variety of icebreakers, rationality games, and other themed evenings & see what works.
Would be awesome if you can be in Playagon—or near us!
I’m interested in hearing a bit more on meeting structure (“Meetup Topics” heading), as well as how it relates to time progression (what types of activities work best for forming the tribe vs. later maintaining it).
This post is wonderful! The general category of “codified knowledge about best practices on how to do something important gained from doing it for hundreds of hours” is way underrepresented on LW. The density of practical experience makes it harder to write than finding a study or bias and musing about it, but it also makes it a lot more useful.
I look forward to helping replicate these practices in the Bay Area. Although achieving gender balance here is going to be a pretty significant challenge...
As a former Evangelical Polyamorist, now a born-again Monogamist, I enthusiastically endorse items 1 & 2 in this comment.
It can be thought of as the cultural equivalent of Algernon’s Law—any small cultural change is a net evolutionary disadvantage. I might add “previously accessible to our ancestors”, since the same principle doesn’t apply to newly accessible changes, which weren’t previously available for cultural optimism. This applies to organizing via websites. It does not apply to polyamory (except inasmuch as birth control, std prevention, and paternity testings may have affected the relevant tradeoffs, though limited to the degree that our reactions are hardwired and relevant).