Would Megacryometeors be another example? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor
Skeptityke
After a decade of nail-biting, over the past two weeks, I have finally broken the habit. Immense thanks to whoever shared the “rubber band around your wrist that you snap to provide negative reinforcement” trick long ago on some half-remembered thread. You made this possible.
Um… In the HPMOR notes section, this little thing got mentioned.
“I am auctioning off A Day Of My Time, to do with as the buyer pleases – this could include delivering a talk at your company, advising on your fiction novel in progress, applying advanced rationality skillz to a problem which is tying your brain in knots, or confiding the secret answer to the hard problem of conscious experience (it’s not as exciting as it sounds). I retain the right to refuse bids which would violate my ethics or aesthetics. Disposition of funds as above.”
That sounds like really exciting news to me, TBH. Someone seriously needs to bid. There are less than 7 hours left and nobody has taken him up on the offer.
If you are ever interested in actually using quantum randomness to base a decision off of, whether you are up against a highly accurate predictor, can’t decide between two fun activities for the day, or something else where splitting yourself may be of use, then there is a very helpful quantum random number generator here. Simply precommit to one decision in case the ending digit is a 0, and another if the ending digit is a 1, and look at this webpage. Right Here.
It doesn’t work for all problems, but the provided problems become much more manageable when you look at the magnitude and number of utility changes, rather than the magnitude and number of utilities. I could be horribly wrong, but looking at the set of utility changes rather than the set of utilities seems like it could be a productive line of inquiry.
I’ve been keeping it up for about 2/3rds of a month by now, so it seems to have worked quite well: I have made my first major step towards being productive. I did it with several tricks.
One: At the end of every day, make a to-do list for tomorrow, and set it as my computer background. Now, every time I get on the computer, I am reminded of which task I am supposed to do.
Two: Logging where all my time goes. I can look at the weeks and identify productive and non-productive times, have ready outside view information available on how long something will take, etc.
Three: (Well, I’m still in the process of forming this habit. Not solidified yet.) I set things up so that every time I get on the internet, an online timer pops up. It forces me to precommit to how long I want to be on. If it rings and I am not doing important work, I get off immediately. Plus, it forces only checking important sites.
Four: Having an imaginary friend to brainstorm future plans with, bounce new ideas off of, stare judgmentally at me if I am doing some outrageously useless thing, give advice, provide helpful daily reminders, and talk about feelings with. Very effective in getting me to switch from “This sucks” mode into “What can be done about this?” mode.
Something I’ve noticed about productivity: It only provides a marginal speedup in getting work done. The total amount of things to do remains the same. The main advantage is that it turns all the little “procrastination breaks” through the day into an hour or two of free time all in one big chunk. It consolidates non-used time so something cool can be done with it. And I now rarely have to stress about deadlines. I have only had to use caffeine once in the past month.
Well, it isn’t quite that, but I made an analogue of it prompted by that exact same thought. Movie 3-d glasses are polarized (the two slightly different images on the screen have orthogonal polarizations, so each image only goes through one lens), so if you can sneak two or more pairs of 3-d glasses out of a movie theater, you can pop the lenses out of one pair, and tape them on the other pair (rotated so that almost all light is canceled out.) The resulting cross-polarized improvised glasses are so dark, that if you made them just right, it is possible to stare straight at the sun and see sunspots. However, this makes them quite useless for most other purposes.
This is another website that may be of use. Just fire it up for a while, pause the stream of numbers, and do what you will with them. It is guaranteed to be quantum-random.
First thing that comes to mind that I just did tonight...I stumbled across a probability “paradox”, noticed that it had an infinity in it, got suspicious, expressed it in a form with finite population size, and took the limit as the population size went to infinity, and what do you know… the paradox vanished in a puff of canceling fractions.
One of my keys for productivity/unproductivity is that when I get interested in something, I become completely locked in on it. I have noticed that trying to stop a timewaster is rather futile while it is in progress, so I’ve developed a strong aversion towards taking on new distractions, obligations, or anything that will waste my time, because not starting in the first place is my point of greatest control over what I will be doing. This is one of the few areas where procrastination actually can help. If somebody tells me about some interesting thing I should be playing/watching/doing, I will either not care at all and quickly forget about it, find an excuse to avoid it, intentionally ignore it, summon my inner critic to repeatedly point out how much of a waste of time it is, or think “I’ll follow up on this later, after some Minecraft.” and never do so. Extreme laziness in the face of time-wasting obligations (which video games and shows count as) is a useful thing to cultivate for me, and my definition of time-wasting is quite a bit broader than that of my friends, though narrower than So8res definition.
The corollary for me is that if I can force myself to do something interesting and difficult for about a week or two, it can turn into a fairly strong passion.
I’d be quite cautious about seeking greater media coverage without a plan to deal with an “Eternal September” on Less Wrong.
What are the most effective charities working towards reducing biotech or pandemic x-risk? I see those mentioned here occasionally as the second most important x-risk behind AI risk, but I haven’t seen much discussion on the most effective ways to fund their prevention. Have I missed something?
It seems like one of the biggest issues will be making sure donors know what other donors are doing during this time period, to prevent overfilling of matching funds, to make sure the right number of people try to spike the donation box at 5, and to coordinate Tyler’s “split up donations” idea during non-peak hours. Maybe there could be a single comment here that is being edited through the day so donors know what the best thing to do at that time is? (preliminary idea)
I’m not sure, but I don’t think we will have access to the number of people who donated for all the other charities. And I suspect that something may be wrong in the math, because that strategy of “donate every minute until 2000 donations occur total” would lead to badly overfilling that hour with donations if, say, 1800 donations were made on behalf of all the other charities.
That math looks like you are calculating the expected value of a raffle ticket randomly awarded to one donor with a value of 2000$.
But instead, the 2000$ is awarded to the charity that received the most donations in one hour. So we just have to donate more times than the second most-donated-to charity.
The opportunity cost bound, with the information that Alexi gave, is 200 donations of 10$. If it ever takes more than 200 donations to get the 2000$, more money could have been earned during the 1-1 dollar matching hour.
So I suspect a good strategy would be to pick a set of off-peak hours where few people are donating, and split up the donations during those times to secure multiple 2000$ prizes with a low(ish) number of donations. Maybe use the success or failure of X number of donations during one off-peak hour to estimate how many donations to do during the next off-peak hour?
Of course, all this assumes that the behavior of the other donors conforms to the normal human diurnal cycle. If they are sufficiently crafty, the multiple charities that have this idea and people willing to wake up at 3 AM may make those hours prohibitively expensive.
I doubt it though. Maybe the European Less Wrong readers could donate during those times so those on the west coast don’t have to wake up at terrible hours?
And does anyone want to set up a prediction market to estimate the number of donors for the second-largest charity during the 1-6 window?
EDIT: Assuming we do 100 donations of 10 dollars each per hour for those 5 hours, and no other charity can muster 100 donations per hour.… (If we can get the prize for less than 100 donations in one hour, the expected value is greater than donating during the 2-1 matching hour) it should only take ~$5000 earmarked for that time period to get 5 2000 dollar prizes. That looks doable.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
It’s very heartening to see so many of these golden tickets so far having gone our way. Go team! Yay for group cooperation! \(n_n)/
I am a bit confused about what happened at 3 and 4 AM, though. Since the early morning hours were being targeted specifically, did the other charities cooperate and focus their efforts specifically on those time slots, or were there just not enough people awake to win at those times?
EDIT: Apparently, the people running the fundraiser initially accidentally had it set up so that each organization was only capable of winning one hourly golden ticket, and after MIRI contacted them, they fixed it, permitting that 20-ticket winning streak.
(Also, DAMN do the matching funds run out fast. Yeah, that makes going for the 2000 dollar tickets rather than the matching funds a much better strategy than I expected. I didn’t realize that the matching fund pool was for all charities combined.)
(And even though MIRI almost certainly would have come up with this strategy without the previous post on the matter, I’m still getting fuzzies by proxy for feeling like I helped raise awareness/strategize.)
Only 40 donations have been made this hour, so would anybody else mind chipping in? They would probably be very high value donations, since it seems to be a bit below the threshold required to win an hour.
This is somewhat important:
We suspect that anonymous donations don’t count towards the “unique donations” total, so if you are donating, please register your name to ensure that you are counted.
Thank you!
Sorry to respond here, but it’s a bit important. We are actually behind first place by about 8 donors, so recruiting an extra 8+ people total may allow us to win the grand prize.
MIRI did not win the 250k in upgrades. However, ~ 110k was raised total that day with ~50k worth of donations, and 21⁄24 2000 dollar golden tickets were picked up by them, which is pretty damn good. The group cooperation strategy was quite effective. Examine the sidebar on the left of this page. http://svgives.razoo.com/giving_events/svg14/home
You live in a matrix universe, and you also know that matrix lords occasionally come down to offer strange requests to individuals. One of these matrix lords asks for you to give him 5 dollars, or else he will press a red button that has a one in a googol chance of killing a googolplex people. The red button’s randomness is not determined by quantum effects. Do you hand over the five dollars in that case?