i exist at saulmunn.com
i blog at brasstacks.blog
Saul Munn
Karma: 740
1 and 3 are not the kind of work I had in mind when writing this take.
what kind of work did you have in mind when writing this take?
what got you from Level 1 to Level 2 won’t be the same thing as what gets you to Level 3
what do you mean by Levels 1, 2, or 3? i have no idea what this is in reference to.
i think this is a reasonable proxy for some stuff people generally care about, but definitely faulty as a north star.
some negative examples:
gambling, alcohol, anything addictive
local optima (e.g. your existing userbase would like your product less if you made X change, but you would reach way more people/reach a different set of people and help them more/etc if you made X change)
some products don’t make sense to have repeat customers, e.g. life insurance policies
thanks for keeping this alive, parker!
i liked this! thanks for writing. last line gave me chills!
yeah, the design is super duper dope. the red fading out the white is a nice touch.
ahh, thanks! @Parker Conley please fix the hyperlink in your post :)
there are plenty of other common stimulants, but caffeine is by far the most commonly used — and also the most likely to be taken mixed into a tasty drink, rather than in a pill.
Are you buying your coffee from a cafe every day or something?
i’m not (i don’t buy caffeinated drinks!), but the people i’m responding to in this post are. in particular, i often notice people go from “i need caffeine” → “i’ll buy a {coffee, tea, energy drink, etc}” — for example, college students, most of whom don’t have the wherewithal to go to the effort of making their own coffee.
thanks, edited!
hmm, it works for me — in what way does it seem broken to you?
Eat your caffeine
…instead of drinking it. I recommend these.
They have the same dosage as a cup of coffee (~100mg).
You can still drink coffee/Diet Coke/tea, just get it without caffeine. Coke caffeine-free, decaf coffee, herbal tea.
They cost ~60¢ per pill [EDIT: oops, it’s 6¢ per pill — thanks @ryan_greenblatt] vs ~$5 for a cup of coffee — that’s about an order of magnitude cheaper.
You can put them in your backpack or back pocket or car. They don’t go bad, they’re portable, they won’t spill on your clothes, they won’t get cold.
Straight caffeine makes me anxious. L-Theanine makes me less anxious. The caffeine capsules I linked above have equal parts caffeine and L-Theanine.
Also:
Caffeine is a highly addictive drug; you should treat it like one. Sipping a nice hot beverage doesn’t make me feel like I’m taking a stimulant in the way that swallowing a pill does.
I don’t know how many milligrams of caffeine were in the last coffee I drank. But I do know exactly the amount of caffeine in every caffeine pill I’ve ever taken. Taking caffeine pills prevents accidentally consuming way too much (or too little) caffeine.
I don’t want to associate “caffeine” with “tasty sugary sweet drink,” for two reasons:
A lot of caffeinated beverages contain other bad stuff. You might not by-default drink a sugary soft drink if it weren’t for the caffeine, so disambiguating the associations in your head might cause you to eat your caffeine and not drink the soda.
Operant conditioning works by giving positive reinforcement to certain behaviors, causing them to happen more frequently. Like, for instance, giving someone a sugary soft drink every time they take caffeine. But when I take caffeine, I want to to be taking it because of a reasoned decision-making process minimally swayed by factors not under my control. So I avoid giving my brain a strong positive association with something that happens every time it experiences caffeine (e.g. a sugary soft drink). Caffeine is addictive enough! Why should I make the Skinner box stronger?
If you can’t take pills, consider getting caffeine patches — though I’ve never tried them, so can’t give it my personal recommendation.
Disclaimers:
Caffeine is a drug. I’m not a doctor, take caffeine at your own risk, this is not medical advice.
This post does not take a stance on whether or not you should take caffeine; the stance that it takes is, conditional on your already having decided to take caffeine, you should take it in pill form (instead of in drink form).
Domain: Prediction Markets
Link: predictionmarketmap.com
Author(s): Saul Munn (self)
Type: Mapping of an ecosystem
Why: Reasonably comprehensive mapping of the prediction market/forecasting ecosystem, including prediction markets, forecasting platforms, research/consultancy firms, tools, resources for learning, community infrastructure, and media/news/journalism.
I thought this was an excellent post. In particular, I’d been trying to think about taste as “a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try,” and I thought your framing through the whole piece was quite crisp.
Thanks for writing this!
Damn good post. Pretty fucking funny, too.
I really enjoy this post, for two reasons: as a slice out of the overall aesthetic of the Bay Area Rationalist; and, as an honest-to-goodness reference for a number of things related to good interior decorating.
I’d enjoy seeing other slices of anthropology on the Rationalist scene, e.g. about common verbal tics (“this seems true” vs “that seems true,” or “that’s right,” or “it wouldn’t be crazy”), or about some element of history.
“The ants and the grasshopper” is a beautifully written short fiction piece that plays around with the structure and ending of the classic Aesop fable: the ants who prepare for winter, and the grasshopper who does not.
I think there’s often a gap between how one thinks through the implications that a certain decision process would have on various difficult situations in the abstract, and how one actually feels while following through (or witnessing others follow through). It’s pretty easy to point at that gap’s existence, but pretty hard to reason well about that gap without being able to tangibly feel it. Fiction can do exactly that, but it’s hard to find a fiction piece that executes on that goal well without turning to heavy-handed cliches. For me, “The ants and the grasshopper” succeeded.
MCE is a clear, incisive essay. Much of it clarified thoughts I already had, but framed them in a more coherent way; the rest straightforwardly added to my process of diagnosing interpersonal harm. I now go about making sense of most interpersonal issues through its framework.
Unlike Ricki/Avital, I haven’t found that much use from its terminology with others, though I often come to internal conclusions generated by explicitly using its terminology then communicate those conclusions in more typical language. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found greater use of the specific terminology if the interpersonal issues I did have happened with people who were already strongly bought into the MCE framework; this isn’t true for me, and I’d guess it also isn’t true for the vast majority of readers.
Overall, MCE is a clear post that explores a grounded, useful framework in-depth.
I’d be interested to see other posts written in similar veins exploring how MCE might be useful for intrapersonal conflicts (e.g. trade between versions of yourself over time, or different internal motivations).
ohh, this is great — agreed on all fronts. thanks shri!
The numbers I have in my Anki deck, selected for how likely I am to find practical use of them:
total # hours in a year — 8760
${{c1::200}}k/year = ${{c2::100}}/hour
${{c1::100}}k/year = ${{c2::50}}/hour
# of hours in a working year — 2,000 hours
miles per time zone — ~1,000 miles
california top-to-bottom — 900 miles
US coast-to-coast — 3,000 miles
equator circumference — (before you show the answer, i always find it fun that i can quickly get an approximation by multiplying the # of time zones by the # of miles per time zone!) :::25,000::: miles
US GDP in 2022 — $25 trillion
google’s profit in 2022 — $60 billion
total US political spending per election — ~$5 billion
median US salary in 2022 — $75k
LMIC’s GDP per capita in 2022 — $2.5k
world population in 2022 — 8 billion
NYC population in 2022 — 8 million
US population in 2022 — 330 million
thanks for clarifying! so, to be clear, is the claim you’re making that: work that has artistic or otherwise subjective aims/values can find a measurement of its value in the extent to which its “customers” (which might include e.g. “appreciators of its art” or “lovers of its beauty”) keep coming back.
does that sound like an accurate description of the view you’re endorsing, or am i getting something wrong in there?