silentbob

Karma: 645

silentbob 4 Jul 2019 19:53 UTC
3 points
on: Hammertime Day 7: Aversion Factoring
One rather trivial inconvenience that negatively impacts my life is having a great aversion to lack of clarity in any kind of workflow. I’ve been meaning to join a boat trip with my girlfriend on a nearby river for a while (the kind in a big boat where you just join 50ish other random people and tour around for an hour looking at things), but from the website it’s really unclear what exactly I need to do. When to be where exactly, how and where to get the actual tickets and that stuff. So I’ve procrastinated that endlessly.

silentbob 14 Aug 2019 7:38 UTC
3 points
on: Bug Hunt 3
Are you better at achieving your values since Hammertime Day 1? If so, what helped?
I’ve been able to (probably lastingly) resolve ~20 bugs so far¹ and make notable improvements in a few areas of my life. Also my productivity increased by roughly 40% since starting hammertime, which however could have various causes (plus, last year too I was most productive during the summer months).
Regarding whether it helped me achieve my values, “no clear values” remains as one of my unresolved bugs, so I can’t really tell.
I’d say the things that helped the most are yoda timers and murphyjitsu. TAPs tend to not work very well for me, but when they do, they’re also very useful.
¹) That really isn’t too much, and I realize it would make sense to allocate a few hours every week to just do some introspection and working on my bugs. So far I’ve mostly just followed hammertime and didn’t do much on top, but I guess the greatest value lies in utilizing all this stuff consistently.

silentbob 20 Aug 2019 20:11 UTC
7 points
on: Design 3: Intentionality
Praise: The way you’ve layed everything out, following the hammertime routine is quite motivating and rewarding. Every new day comes with a bit of a dopamine rush.
Criticism: a few of the days don’t have any real action attached, such as this one, where actually implementing design improvements appears somewhat optional and all you really ask us to do is write a comment. This may very well just be me, but more consistent “homework” (e.g. each day requiring at least one yoda timer of some kind) would be helpful to establish some consistency.

silentbob 22 Aug 2019 11:12 UTC
3 points
on: CoZE 3: Empiricism
Share an experience where you radically underestimated or overestimated your own ability.
Overestimated: being filmed for an interview for a promo video of my company. Didn’t think much of it beforehand, but it turned out to be awkward as hell, zero usable footage emerged. Wasting the time of all the ~8 people in the room wasn’t great.
Underestimated: Nothing too radical, but giving a speech at a big birthday party. Expected it to be decent as I generally enjoy public speaking, but it went smoother than I thought, people laughed at the jokes and I think most were actually interested in what I said. Some complimented me on the speech afterwards which was nice.

silentbob 1 Sep 2019 12:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: Internal Double Crux
I can relate. The few times when I used IDC in the past, it did feel useful, but still it’s not really enjoyable. Maybe it’s the fact that with IDC I’m not so much solving a problem but rather figuring out something about myself. There maybe won’t be any cool hacks or workarounds to solve it all, but in the end it’s more about coming to terms with things. So maybe choosing IDC as the best tool to approach a bug already feels like a small defeat which causes me to rather not choose it and try other, more outward-facing tools instead, or ignore the bug entirely. Something like that.

silentbob 1 Sep 2019 13:09 UTC
8 points
on: The Strategic Level
Share a story of a cure that was worse than the disease.
Not too long ago my girlfriend once said a few things I found hurtful. A few days later I decided to talk things through with her. Unfortunately that day she was in a rather bad mood for different reasons (which I hadn’t fully comprehended until that point), which caused the talk to derail a bit and become more hurtful, different from the past when having these meta relationship talks always worked rather well.
My reaction to this initially was to assume she had just changed over time and had somehow “lost her empathy”—so basically fundamental attribution error, assuming that’s apparently how she is now rather than she’s having a bad day and maybe we should talk about this some other time. My over-correction was to decide just not to have such talks anymore and keep stuff to myself. Fortunately though she sorted things out later and I quickly made sure to unlearn that lesson.
One meta lesson I learned from this is that I personally tend to over-correct on any kind of negative evidence in relationships and probably social situations in general.

silentbob 2 Sep 2019 12:13 UTC
1 point
on: [Hammertime Final Exam] Accommodate Yourself; Kindness Is An Epistemic Virtue; Privileging the Future
Their hypothesis was that the child would indeed regret it, even though the decision was clearly correct—which would show that regret is not reliable information about the quality of one’s past decisions.
Food for thought! I guess System 1′s tendency to overvalue the present might cause us to discount the future as well as the past. I’m not quite sure to which degree I would consider this likely however. At least I personally usually do not regret decisions from the past that had positive effects on my well being, even if the alternative would be to experience that increased well being now.
But even then, the only purpose regret seems to have is to prevent us from repeating past mistakes. But this is 1) prone to overcorrecting and 2) we’d be much better off learning the lesson without having to suffer from that nagging feeling of regret for basically ever.

silentbob 4 Sep 2019 7:04 UTC
8 points
on: Hammertime Final Exam
I did it: my final exam.
Thank you for the sequence, had a great time, will leave a few additional thoughts in the post mortem post.

silentbob 5 Sep 2019 10:17 UTC
2 points
on: The Value of Your Time, or Why You Should Buy an AC
I strongly agree with the essence of this post, considering I’ve spent quite some time recently thinking about the value of my time and trying to somehow put it into reasonable numbers in order to make everyday decisions easier and more well informed.
About a year ago I took the clearerthinking test and ended up with ~32€, which seemed high, and looking back I think it wasn’t particularly accurate. I’m thus not a great fan of that test personally and think getting a correct value requires much deeper thought than this small questionnaire prompts you to do (although thinking about the issue at all is of course already useful). One benefit it has though is that it clearly shows the asymmetry in our intuitions (aka loss aversion), so that was very helpful at the time, yet the number that came out provided me with a false sense of certainty.
Thinking through things further these last few days, I revised that value now to very roughly 12€ (varying from around 6€ to 18€ depending on the type of action, although I assume EA work should very likely be rated much higher than that). But just as the earlier value, it still is mostly based on intuitions and inner simulation regarding what price I’d accept for e.g. somebody asking me to simply do nothing at all for a week. So it’s still on fairly shaky grounds. Calculating the external value my time has on the world is difficult as so far I’m focusing more on learning and developing than on generating actual output (the latter only making up 1-2 hours per week so far).
One difficulty is that it’s not easy to look at the marginal value only, plus the consequences it has on one’s behavior could easily shift spending in a way that the marginally value itself changes significantly. If I spend 200€ more per month, money suddenly becomes more scarce and thus valuable. If I reduce my day job work time from 5 to 4 days a week, the same thing happens. So after any major change or decision I have to reevaluate and come up with new numbers.
Despite these difficulties however, thinking deeply about this and reducing one’s uncertainty however far possible is certainly time well spent. Thanks for the post!

silentbob 5 Sep 2019 11:17 UTC
1 point
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: [Hammertime Final Exam] Quantum Walk, Oracles and Sunk Meaning
Quantum Walk: That’s pretty much it.
Oracle: Possibly, didn’t get around to reading it all so far. As far as I understand from just skimming, I guess a difference may be that the term deconfusion is used with regards to a domain where people are at risk of thinking they understand and aren’t aware of any remaining confusion. I was more referring to situations where the presence of confusion is clear, but one struggles to identify a strategy to reduce it. In that case it may be helpful to focus on the origin of one’s own confusion first as opposed to the thing one is trying to understand.
Sunk Meaning: Yes, plus there may be times when we are talking about meaning / interpretation without realizing so, falsely assuming we’re referring to actual properties of the real world. In the above example, people may feel like “we should use the cow’s skin as otherwise it is wasted” is a real argument, that reality would in some way be better when acting that way, because “wasting things = bad”. That’s a (usually useful but still at times) flawed heuristic though. I wonder if there are more ways where we intuitively think we’re talking about properties of the real world, when in actuality we’re only referring to states of our own mind.

silentbob 12 Sep 2019 7:20 UTC
4 points
on: Hammertime Postmortem
As mentioned in the final exam, here’s my personal summary of how I experienced hammertime.
I feel like following the sequence was a very good use of my time, even though it turned out a bit different from what I had initially expected. I thought it would focus much more on “hammering in” the techniques (even after reading Hammers & Nails and realizing the metaphor worked in a different way), but it was more about trying everything out rather briefly, as well as some degree of obtaining new perspectives on things. This was fine, too, but I still feel like I haven’t got a real idea about whether things such as goal/aversion factoring, mantras, internal double crux, focusing or timeless decision making actually do anything for me. I applied some of the techniques once, but it didn’t really lead to any tangible results. I may have done them incorrectly, or I may need to practice more, or maybe they just don’t work for me, and it’s now up to me to figure this out in detail.
I derived a lot of value from creating and frequently updating the bug list. TAPs are a neat concept, and those that work are really helpful, but many fail for me. Maybe I’ll get a better feeling for which triggers work for me so I can tell beforehand instead of going through days and weeks of consistent failure with a trigger. Design surely works, but I’ve got some aversions to applying it which I’ll have to unravel. CoZE is something I never really doubted, and I like the new framing of basically just becoming the kind of person who’s open to new things, as opposed to forcing oneself to do scary things. I’ve been following the “all else being equal expanding my comfort zone is good” heuristic for a few years already, and will continue to do so, as my natural instinct otherwise is usually to exploit rather than to explore.
Yoda timers/resolve cycles and murphyjitsu probably had the greatest effect on me. On day 10 I murphyjitsued three of my major quarter goals and increased my expected value of how many of them I’d achieve from 1.24 to 2.08 in the process. At the time these were merely predictions and would be worthless if they were not correlated with reality—now however I can say that I’m on track to reach 2.5/3, and I’m highly confident that murphyjitsu made a huge counterfactual difference and I hadn’t simply been underconfident before.
I followed the sequence with a group of other people, sharing our progress in a slack channel, which kept up my motivation and probably made it a lot more interesting than “merely” following a year old sequence on my own, so that’s certainly something I recommend to others who are interested in giving it a try.
To provide some numbers, I’ve identified 175 bugs by now, 35 of which I consider solved, and around half of which I expect to solve within the next year, which isn’t overly ambitious but still in the order of “life-changing” if things work out, which sounds good enough for me.
So, overall: Thanks a lot alkjash!

silentbob 16 Mar 2020 12:30 UTC
1 point
on: How to have a happy quarantine
One game/activity I generally recommend because of its potential ¹¹⁄₁₀ fun payoff in the end, which also works in relative isolation, is having fun with gap texts (just figured out this is apparently known as “mad libs”, so maybe this isn’t actually new to anybody). The idea being that one person creates a small story with many words left out, and then asks other people to fill in the words without knowing the context. So “Bob scratched his <bodypart> and <verb> insecurely. ‘You know’, he said <adverb>, ’when I was a(n) <adjective> boy, I always wanted to become a(n) <noun>, but I couldn’t, because my <bodypart> is/are too <adjective>” might be part of such a story. You pick these gaps in random order and query people for the thing you need (or if you’re alone, you can even do this yourself given you manage to hide the context from yourself). Afterwards you read the story out loud to everybody involved.
I’ve done this a few times both with groups and just with my girlfriend and it never disappointed. Usually takes some time to write and fill in the story, but I think it’s very much worth it. Also, this gets funnier with experience as you figure out both what kind of text works best (involving body parts is certainly a great idea) and also what kinds of words to fill the gaps with (e.g. very visual ones, or such with certain connotations).

silentbob 24 Sep 2020 10:53 UTC
4 points
on: Hammers and Nails
Going through Hammertime for the second time now. I tried to figure out 10 not too usual ways in which to utilize predictions and forecasting. Not perfectly happy with the list of course, but a few of these ideas do seem (and to my experience actually are; 1 and 2 in particular) quite useful.
1. Predicting own future actions to calibrate on one’s own behavior
2. When setting goals, using predictions on the probability of achieving them by a certain date, giving oneself pointers which goals/plans need more refinement
3. Predicting the same relatively long term things independently at different points in time (without seeing earlier predictions), figuring out how much noise one’s predictions entail (by then comparing many predictions of the same thing, which, if no major updates shifted the odds, should stay about the same (or consistently go up/down slightly over time due to getting closer to the deadline))
4. Predicting how other people react to concrete events or news, deliberately updating one’s mental model of them in the process
5. Teaming up with others, meta-predicting whether a particular set of predictions by the other person(s) will end up being about right, over- or underconfident
6. When buying groceries (or whatever), before you’re done, make a quick intuitive prediction of what the total price will be
7. When buying fresh fruit or vegetables or anything else that’s likely to spoil, make predictions how likely it is you’re going to eat each of these items in time
8. Frequently, e.g. yearly, make predictions about your life circumstances in x years, and evaluate them in the future to figure out whether you tend to over- or underestimate how much your life changes over time
9. Before doing something aversive, make a concrete prediction of how (negative) you’ll experience it, to figure out whether your aversions tend to be overblown
10. Experiment with intuitive “5 second predictions” vs those supported by more complex models (Fermi estimate, guesstimate etc.) and figure out which level of effort (in any given domain) works best for you; or to frame it differently, figure out whether your system 1 or system 2 is the better forecaster, and maybe look for ways in which both can work together productively

silentbob 6 Oct 2020 11:50 UTC
3 points
on: Hammertime Day 1: Bug Hunt
It’s not that easy to come up with strange bugfix stories (or even noteworthy bugfix stories in general).
One that’s still in progress is that I’ve been using gamification to improve my posture. I simply count the occurrences throughout the day when I remember to sit/stand straight, and track them, summing them up over time to reach certain milestones, in combination with a randomized reward system. While I wasn’t too convinced in this attempt at first, it happens more and more often that I remember to sit up straight and realize I already do so, which is a good sign I guess.
Quite a few bugs could be solved for me using spreadsheets. Tracking stuff and seeing graphs of development over time often provides just enough motivation for me to stick to new habits.
The bug of occasionally watching too many youtube videos has been partially resolved by me initially being too lazy to connect speakers to my computer. I’m now more or less deliberately keeping it that way just for that advantage.

silentbob 16 Oct 2020 7:18 UTC
5 points
on: Hammertime Day 6: Mantras
“When in doubt, go meta”. Thanks to my friend Nadia for quoting it often enough for it to have found a place deep within my brain. May not be the perfect mantra, but it is something that occurs to me frequently and almost always seems yet again unexpectedly useful.

silentbob 21 Oct 2020 6:32 UTC
1 point
on: Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith
I’d probably put it this way – the Sunk Cost Fallacy is Mostly Bad, but motivated reasoning may lead to frequent false positive detections of it when it’s not actually relevant. There are two broad categories where sunk cost considerations come into play, a) cases where aborting a project feels really aversive because so much has gone into it already, and b) cases where on some level you really want to abort a project, e.g. because the fun part is over or your motivation has decreased over time. In type a cases, knowing about the fallacy is really useful. In type b cases, knowing about the fallacy is potentially harmful because it’s yet another instrument to rationalize quitting an actually worthwhile project.
You can use a hammer to drive nails into walls, or you can use a hammer to hurt people. The sunk cost fallacy may be a “tool” with higher than usual risk of hurting yourself. This is probably a very blurry/grayscale distinction that varies a lot between individuals however, and not a clear cut one about this particular tool being bad. But I definitely agree it makes a lot of sense to talk about the drawbacks of that particular concept as there is an unusually clear failure mode involved (as described in the post).

silentbob 23 Oct 2020 9:32 UTC
2 points
on: Hammertime Day 9: Time Calibration
I’ve mostly been aware of the planning fallacy and how despite knowing of it for many years it still often affects me (mostly for things where I simply lack the awareness of realizing that the planning fallacy would play a role at all; so not so much for big projects, but rather for things that I never really focus on explicitly, such as overhead when getting somewhere). The second category you mention however is something I too experience frequently, but having lacked a term (/model) for it, I didn’t really think about it as a thing.
I wonder what classes of problems typically fall into the different categories. At first I thought it may simply depend on whether I feel positive or negative about a task (positive → overly optimistic → planning fallacy; negative → pessimistic → vortex of dread), but the “overhead when getting somewhere” example doesn’t really fit the theory, and also one typical example for the planning fallacy is students having to hand in an assignment by a certain date, which usually is more on the negative side. But I guess the resolution to this is simply that the vortex of dread is not different from the planning fallacy, but a frequent cause of it.
- we tend to overestimate how long things take that we feel negative about → vortex of dread
- this causes us to procrastinate it more than we otherwise would → planning fallacy (so the “net time” is lower than anticipated, but the total time until completion is longer than anticipated)
Which leaves me with three scenarios:
1. positive things → planning fallacy due to optimism
2. negative things → vortex of dread → planning fallacy due to procrastination
3. trivial things I fail to explicitly think about → planning fallacy due to ignorance/negligence
And thus there may be different approaches to solving each of them, such as
1. pre-mortem / murphyjitsu, outside view
2. knowing about the vortex of dread concept, yoda timers, scheduling, intentionality
3. TAPs I guess?

silentbob 26 Oct 2020 8:07 UTC
2 points
on: Hammertime Day 10: Murphyjitsu
Where I find Murphyjitsu most useful is in the area of generic little issues with my plans that tend to come up rather often. A few examples:
- forgetting about working on the goal in time, due to lack of a reminder, planning fallacy etc.
- the plan involving asking another person for a favor, and me not feeling too comfortable about asking
- my system 1 not being convinced of the goal, requiring more motivation / accountability / pressure
- the plan at some point (usually early on) requiring me to find an answer to some question, such that the remaining plan depends on that answer; my dislike for uncertainty ironically often causes me then to just flinch away from that whole plan as opposed to just trying to find that one important answer
It’s arguably more of a checklist than real “by the book Murphyjitsu”, but still, taking a goal and going through these things, trying to figure out the most trivial and easy to fix issues with the plan, often allows me to increase the likelihood of achieving a goal by 10-20% with just a few minutes of work.

silentbob 11 Dec 2020 13:32 UTC
8 points
in reply to: silentbob’s comment on: Hammertime Postmortem
Update a year later, in case anybody else is similarly into numbers: that prediction of achieving 2.5 out of the 3 major quarter goals ended up being correct (one goal wasn’t technically achieved due to outside factors I hadn’t initially anticipated, but I had done my part, thus the .5), and I’ve been using a murphyjitsu-like approach for my quarterly goals ever since which I find super helpful. In the three quarters before Hammertime, I achieved 59%, 38% and 47% respectively of such goals. In the quarters since the numbers were (in chronological order, starting with the Hammertime quarter) 59%, 82%, 61%, 65%, 65%, ~82%. While total number and difficulty of goals vary, I believe the average difficulty hasn’t changed much whereas the total number has increased somewhat over time. That being said, I also visited a CFAR workshop shortly after going through Hammertime, so that too surely had some notable effect on the positive development.
My bug list has grown to 316 as of today, ~159 of which are solved, following a roughly linear pattern over time so far.

silentbob 27 Dec 2020 21:51 UTC
1 point
on: Simultaneous Randomized Chess
Very interesting concept, thanks for sharing!