This is a good start: https://lifehacker.com/five-steps-that-make-it-easier-to-skim-through-non-fict-1758111229
Skimming a much larger volume of material with fewer commitments to a ‘full stack read’ (reading with note taking and later iterated summarization) allows one to more easily identify top quality information.
“ChuckMcM 3 days ago [-]
I am always amazed when people make comments like this: “The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are in.”
“Professor Michael Webber’s “Energy 101,” which had an enrollment that peaked at around 44,000 students, had 5,000 receive a certificate of completion — about 13 percent of the roughly 38,000 students who ultimately participated.”
So let’s unpack this a bit. Professor Webber created a class called “Energy 101” and processed 5,000 students through it to completion. Your typical 100 level undergraduate class might have anywhere from 50 to 200 students in it.
UT Austin this year had 8690 freshman total.
So assuming the largest possible class of 200, this professor in one semester taught the equivalent of 25 semesters of 200 student classes, in one semester.
Why should we care that 32,000 people signed up and then said “Woah, really don’t have the time to commit to this right now?”
I experimented with some of these techniques for a while but found much bigger gains from improving my information searching, filtering, and skimming (random and structured sampling rules of thumb) heuristics.
Upvoted for trying to communicate something hard to communicate. This can be really frustrating leading to people often not trying, so thanks for trying.
>”I know it when I see it.” but we might not be able to describe what “it” is.
hard to generate easy to verify functions. Related: Gendlin’s ‘sharp’ blank, or a blank that knows what it is looking for, eg tip of the tongue phenomena, or forgetting what you’re looking for and then remembering when you see it.
Dumping all distractions to an empty sheet is often helpful.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html
Made me realize that the things that are optimized for attention aren’t the things optimized for accomplishing anything useful. I’ve since pursued many contrarian rabbit holes, some of which were of enormous benefit.
Also, betting on things continuing to get better contra all the doom and gloom that is mostly generated by class tensions between the American middle class and upper class (using moralizing about the lower class as a weapon/distraction) who are both absurdly well off. Expecting to retire abroad because retiring to the US is too much a random gamble given health care costs. Also things like not expecting children to cost much money because I don’t think spending money on education accomplishes anything (outside the scope of financial literacy per se, but affects things a lot). That and some various FIRE tropes decreases magnitude and variance on expected money spent to achieve a given level of well being over a life time.
Don’t have it on hand but noticeably condensed in Sur/Petition.
Financial literacy enormously reduced worries about things like retirement and buying a house which increased my risk tolerance which lead to me working on projects that I actually care about.
>Peter Thiel’s smart and highly original book
A lot of it struck me as incredibly similar to Edward de Bono’s material from the 70′s and 80′s albeit applied to startup memes, which is still valuable.
>unmediated-by-ontology knowledge of reality.
I think this is a confused concept, related to wrong-way-reduction.
A short heuristic for self inquiry:
write down things you think are true about important areas of your life
produce counter examples
write down your defenses/refutations of those counter examples
come back later when you are less defensive and review whether your defenses were reasonable
if not, why not? whence the motivated reasoning? what is being protecting from harm?
When young you mostly play within others’ reward structures. Many choose which structure to play in based on Max reward. This is probably a mistake. You want to optimize for opportunity to learn how to construct reward structures.
Deference networks seem underrated.
> “How much value has this organization created?”
can insights from prediction markets work for helping us select better proxies and decision criteria or do we expect people to be too poorly entangled with the truth of these matters for that to work? Do orgs always require someone who is managing the ontology and incentives to be super competent at that to do well? De facto improvements here are worth billions (project management tools, slack, email add ons for assisting managing etc.)
One thing I don’t understand about cycles is that they seem fine as long as you have a generalized cycle detector and a single instance of a cycle getting generated is fine because the losses from one (or a few) rounds is small. I guess people think of utility functions as fixed normally, but this sort of rolls in fixed point/convergence intuitions into the problem formulation.
One frame is that utility functions as a formalism are just an extension of the great rationality debate.
Not an explicit exercise and likely mentioned or alluded to somewhere in the forecasting stuff, but remember that any time you are about to run any sort of outside view/reference class forecast you have the opportunity to get some calibration by first trying to answer the question yourself based on what you know, including your confidence bounds on your model. When you subsequently look up the data and get any surprises, you can ask yourself why you are surprised which helps you to figure out what generators the experts have that you don’t.
Since you can do this all the time (how many google searches do you do a day?) it gives you a lot more data than one time exercises.
It could use a clever anchor phrase for memory purposes. Open to suggestions.
See the butterfly and the net for generativity.
A service where a teenager reads something you wrote slowly and sarcastically. The points at which you feel defensive are worthy of further investigation.