it wasn’t until the end of the post that i finally drew the connection between “focusing” as a label for the process you’re following and the “focusing” used in the title. given how broad is the meaning of the word “focus”, i think we ought to embrace slightly more explicit labels when discussing this technique outside of its niche, e.g. “introspective focusing” (as opposed to focusing on an external task, as is perhaps the more common use of the phrase).
ponkaloupe
Karma: 131
regarding that poll:
[how much would you pay] to go back to the way of life you had before the pandemic?
i really can’t think of any previous lifestyle that i actually want to go back to living. maybe it’s because i’m young, but if my lifestyle this year is ever worse than the prior year, that’s pretty close to saying that i failed at life for that year. humans are adaptable: i’m not at all surprised if 42% of respondents have adapted over the last two years and created new habits and ways of life that they aren’t interested in giving up. i’m \it{happy} for those who wouldn’t revert their lifestyle changes for a modest amount of $, because it hints that they made very positive lifestyle changes.
You explain how it wouldn’t be costly (to people who can afford backpacks), then insist it would be costly.
when i was a kid, i’d bring an umbrella with me to the bus stop on rainy days. when i boarded the bus, i’d set it down next to me to give it time to dry off (didn’t want to get the books inside my pack wet). i can’t tell you how many trips i had to make to the lost and found after forgetting that umbrella on the bus, in the lunchroom, or anywhere else.
in the end, i ditched the umbrella and waited for the bus under the overhang of my neighbor’s porch. umbrellas just aren’t worth the hassle for all but the worst of storms in the PNW — backpack or no. well, unless the rain really bothers you or you’re exceptionally unforgetful.
an important aspect of Pomodoro at a corporate gig is not “how long can i remain attentive” but “how long is it acceptable to be unreachable for”. it’s about guaranteeing yourself an uninterrupted chunk of time, by disabling slack/email/etc. as long as you’re doing vaguely productive things for that time slot, you’ve already unlocked most of the benefits.
for truly personal work, i mostly don’t use Pomodoro timers, and go for a more freeform approach: once i feel myself slowing down, i’ll set down my work, take a break, and then pick a different thing off my to-do list. the exception is for tasks that i have trouble getting started on. say, a book whose opening isn’t hooking me. i’ll set a timer promising to do the activity for 15 minutes. during those minutes, i free myself from thinking about the meta picture of “is this the right task to be working on” and can properly focus on getting into the book. when the alarm goes off, only then do i reconsider my priorities, and either keep at the task without the timer, or put it down.
in the end, maybe it’s just about being aware/explicit with your time. no timer is going to force you into flow. but it will force you to think more critically about your time.
this is an interesting take, that death (or the uncertainty of it) might be worse than life and also both together worse than non-existence for a person. then a further question: if we take complete lack of experience to be neutral (sleep, in Hume’s example), and we had a magic device that could grant each individual the opportunity to cease experience from this moment to their naturally occurring death (i.e. to become a zombie), 1) how many people who claim their life has negative value would follow through by using this device and 2) is this meaningfully different from choosing death directly? from the experiential point of view it’s identical. from the experience of those around you, not as much, though in the zombie case you’re being dishonest with those around you and that brings its own baggage.
also interesting is that even in the friendliest of utilitarian views the repugnant conclusion usually ends with “a plethora of near-0-value lives” or “a single maximally high-value life”. less discussed is a plethora of willful negative existences required to enable a counteracting positive existence (for example, a miserable father who slaves away so his children may lead better lives). yet that arrangement is arguably more relatable to the typical individual, who may frequently embrace negative states in order to obtain later positive ones (e.g. as simple as setting an early alarm clock so that you can admire the sun rise).
the saving grace to all this, for me, is that i find it incredibly unlikely that any of these distasteful utilitarian hypotheticals actually represent the global maximum. or even significant local maxima for that matter. no matter if it’s the sum or the mean, negative experience immediately adjacent to positive experience doesn’t seem to be so stable. most human relationships are co-beneficial, for example. many people gain more than they lose when they give (charity/philanthropy/etc).
Even their original plan was to blockade the capital until vaccine mandates were lifted, and again this does not work at all since the pro-mandate side can do the same thing and also we can’t have policy determined by who can rally larger groups of people.
a charitable interpretation of the trucker’s protest is “govt restricted my freedom of movement, so i’m restricting their freedom of movement (by blocking border crossings)”. IF you could convincingly frame your protest like this — as a tit-for-tat response — you avoid lending legitimacy to any escalatory action by the pro-mandate side (because it will necessarily be just that: the pro-mandate side made the first escalation two whole years ago and so long as you strictly act according to reciprocity an unfavorable response from your opponent can always be framed as being unfair/unreasonable/unjust).
i’m of the opinion that the anti-mandate side has some source of inherent legitimacy to it not accessible by the other side simply because it was their opposing side which first escalated (merely by introducing mandates where they didn’t before). i’m not making a statement comparing the overall legitimacy of these two side — just pointing out an advantage that can only ever be granted to one side. but it’s extremely difficult to tap into that advantage: especially when dealing with loosely coordinated groups, tit-for-tat becomes unstable, fast.
are there parallels that a US citizen could be more directly affected by, and which could be informed by these current events in Russia/Ukraine? for example, i’m seeing people draw the link that how this Russia/Ukraine conflict proceeds will have implications for the future of China/Taiwan, which will be more directly relevant to the US. it seems to me that China has exerted far more soft power and less military power in this context so far, so my initial reaction is to think that the situations are distinct enough that one won’t substantially inform the other.
there’s a lot of ways you can lose a domain. ICANN requires a domain’s WHOIS records (which includes email, tel, and physical address) to be accurate. i don’t have much experience with enforcement, but i think some TLDs are more impacted by this than others — e.g. .us explicitly treats WHOIS records as public and periodically “spot checks” the accuracy of records. [1]
additionally, ownership over the popular .io TLD has been contested in the past. i understand that the DNS root servers themselves are highly decentralized, across continents even, but the smaller TLDs and the registration part of it feels like it might be one of those human systems that relies heavily on norms and pure-hearted authorities.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7251-2005Mar4.html
2: https://salt.agency/blog/biot-chagos-islands-risk-to-io-cctld-domains/
i think this piece would benefit from a few examples of historic ideas which boosted the labor productivity multiple. it’s not clear to me why ideas aren’t treated as just a specific “type” of capital: if the ideas you’re thinking of are things like “lean manufacturing” or “agile development”, these all originated under existing capital structures and at one time had specific “owners” (like Toyota). we have intellectual property laws, so some of these ideas can be owned: they operate as an enhancement to labor productivity and even require upkeep (depreciation) to maintain: one has to teach these ideas to new workers. so they seem like a form of capital to me.
my suspicion is that these “ideas” are just capital which has escaped any concrete ownership. they’re the accumulation of positive externalities. it’s worth noting that even once these ideas escape ownership, they don’t spread for free: we have schools, mentorship, etc. people will voluntarily participate in the free exchange of ideas (e.g. enthusiast groups), but that doesn’t mean there’s no upkeep in these ideas: it just isn’t financialized. in the end, a new idea displacing an old one doesn’t look all that different from a more efficient (higher output per input) machine displacing a less efficient machine: they’re both labor productivity enhancements which require some capital input to create and maintain.
Discussion of whether “punishment” is even a useful concept from the government-level perspective or whether the goal should always be reduction in future crime.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
Abortion comes to mind as an example of a moral question that the government has to legislate on.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.
adding to this: fold related tasks together. let your commute be your workout (i.e. jog or bike home from work). if you want to cook a good meal some evening, but also leave time open for socializing, then invite your friends over to cook with you. if you want to learn woodworking and don’t like the furniture in your home, then learn by building new furniture.
that last bit is where the “trade money for time” scheme risks being derailed. in the end, you’re never strictly exchanging money for time — outside of life-extension efforts. you’re identifying an opportunity to replace your time spent doing A with time spent doing B, at a cost of C. the more you dislike A (doing the dishes), probably the more you should be willing to pay for replacing it with B (reading a book while the dishwasher runs). but if A isn’t a chore… if it’s a hobby you enjoy for its own sake (woodworking), then it might not ever make sense to outsource it.
because most of us specialize in only one form of production, we think of these trades as me giving money and receiving a preferable use of time. once you’re dealing in productive hobbies, it’ll make sense to treat this as an exchange that can go in either direction. if your hobby is to woodwork, but you live next to Ikea, in might be a reasonable course of action to spend $200 on lumber, a few evenings turning that into a table, and then selling the table for $150. it looks dumb on the surface but each trade individually could make sense (my enjoyment from this hobby is >= $200; my benefit from this table is ⇐ $150).
then you get to the point where it’s worth considering nonfungible intangibles — like sentimentality. that table from above might be worth $150 to a buyer off the street, but your grandma might consider the thing “priceless”. she would never buy it from you for what it’s actually worth to her, because doing so destroys some of the sentiment she attaches to the table. so gift the table to her. she’ll be inclined to pay it back in other forms (hosting dinners, etc — chances are she’s more than covered the cost of the table by raising you though so arguably you’re paying back a > $150 debt with the gift).
in areas where land is competitive — i.e. those areas where LVT is most impactful — it’s common for developers to buy a lot, tear down an existing home, and then build a new one. consider:
lot with old home (O) → empty lot (E) → lot with new home (N)
if O → N is a value-positive transition, and it’s not possible to go there without passing through E, then both O → E and E → N ought to be value-positive. O → E is valuable because it reduces the amount of work required to reach the valuable (and more liquid) state N.
so why don’t we see more empty lots go up for sale in areas where it’s routine to redevelop lots? my guess is it’s just different types of friction coming together to create a transaction cost around selling empty lots. integrating that whole process from O → N overcomes the transaction cost, yielding more profit. maybe you can say “gosh, structure X would go great on lot Y or Z”, but you have no way of communicating “i’d pay $D for an empty lot Y or Z”, and so a meaningful market for empty lots never emerges.
but create a market for empty lots — i.e. reduce the transaction costs in that area and encourage separate specialization of O → E from E → N — and you should have much more data for calculating land values. i’m not sure how to create that market other than literally creating a marketplace and then incentivizing each side of the market to participate in your marketplace until it’s bootstrapped, i.e. the Uber approach.
Eth lending rates on Aave/Compound have remained < 1% for literally years. most returns in DeFi are dollar-denominated. the sustainable ones don’t seem to move much outside the 2-6% APY range (except during bull markets where people will pay a premium to leverage their Eth/BTC — but we’re no longer in a bull market). the 20% APY dollar-denominated yields have shown themselves to largely be unsustainable (e.g. UST). in an environment where the sustainable DeFi yields no longer vastly outcompete bonds/treasuries, why would you be bullish on DeFi?
follow-up: if you’re using DeFi today, which platforms are you using which i’m likely to be overlooking when i make these claims?
If people were more aware of the limits of politics, disengagement and cynicism would probably increase. These attitudes are already a problem, particularly among the less educated, and are associated with a series of negative outcomes.
this is a particularly interesting statement to me. on the one hand, the bulk of your post is about illuminating the limits of politics, and you mention academics and such admitting to these limits. hence, “awareness of the limits of politics” is supposed to be a highly-educated view. then you illustrate the downstream effects of disengagement and cynicism, but cite these as problems among the lesser-educated — the opposite end of the education spectrum.
so which is it? is awareness of the limits of politics a good thing only when a person is “highly educated enough” to convince themselves that carrying on the illusion, and not disengaging, is a good thing? if this is true, you should be able to convince the other person of this view, and then feel safe in revealing the rest of the truth. much of this post has the vibe of “we can’t trust these fools with the truth, thus we’re going to withhold it and thereby ensure that they remain fools”… there’s a lot of hubris to that idea.
Not only do our brains say “no fuck you, you don’t get to work on rockets”
getting yourself to somewhere on this curve which is not the far left but also not too far to the right can be unbelievably productive. there’s a certain type of infatuation which drives one to show off their achievements, which in turn requires one to make achievements. building a rocket, and inventiveness in general, is a decently high status thing: you may experience a greater drive to actually do these things during a certain period of infatuation.
this could make certain statistical measurements less noisy, but as you point out there are so many confounding variables to deal with (e.g. period effects). if we couldn’t conclude anything from the 50 years ago where we made this same change (in reverse), i don’t quite understand what’s different this time around such that we will be able to conclude things from this change.
i can’t think of another (pseudo-)acronym which gets used as an all-caps unit, off the top of my head. i may toy around with “Flop” as a unit, like GFlop for a billion operations, GFlop/s for a billion operations per second.
since this post isn’t getting much traction i’ll propose a different angle. most of us here are very aware of coordination problems, and those of us living in democracies are explicitly given regular opportunities to participate in a system of which one of its claims is to overcome certain coordination problems (e.g. legislate some thing which works only if universally adopted, and then force everyone to adhere to that legislation).
this particular system of democracy has its successes and its flaws, but viewing it as a tool, what’s the best way to make use of it? for example, should one simply vote for their self-interests? should one eschew voting because the time required results in negative EV? should one publicly discuss alternatives and then use their vote as a lever to direct more attention to these alternatives (think: voting for “obviously bad” nihilistic policies/representatives)?
in an earlier, social, life, i always met my dates through my friends. i never had to go out of my way to make friends of both sexes, my hobbies/interests just happened to attract both. 10 years later, all my friends are dudes, 90% of my friends’ friends are dudes, and my social ties are just fewer in number.
i’m focused on just growing my immediate friend network at the moment. i was raised to not use my real name on the internet, much less post photos of my face on it. i’ve had just enough continued success in that approach that i haven’t been forced to concede. but i legitimately enjoyed having my friends set me up on dates. i’m not ready to abandon that method of dating and relegate matchmaking to some app behind a screen. part of this is the expectation that i’m far less likely to be compatible with the wide pool of candidates on a dating app than with the narrower pool filtered through my lifelong friends. but a bigger part is probably just stubbornness, holding onto a dying model. and maybe some amount of risk aversion — not of the “fear of rejection” type — but of dismissing the new models without first risking them. i think it’s distinct from laziness, but maybe it falls into #9.