If this meetup happens, I’d drop in.
stoat
My own experience is that it is fairly easy to identify points of confusion, and the hard part is finding a book or whatever, at the right level, to address that specific point. This is a tough problem to solve with self-teaching.
I also find that scary/frustrating. But don’t you find you can relearn those forgotten chunks much more rapidly than the first time, if you need to?
I agree the problem is even more pronounced in physics.
Also, I am interested in and would appreciate the details of the case study to which you refer.
Thanks for this. I guess this goes to show how hard it can be to communicate math well. When I learned the sin(x)/x limit I accepted the “proof” by geometric intuition with no protest and was not alert to any deeper source of confusion here.
Come to think of it, the rigorous treatments of sine that I’ve seen probably all use power series definitions. To see that it’s the same function as the one defined using triangles I expect you have to appeal to derivative properties, so that approach would not skirt the issue.
I recommend articles by Chad Waterbury and Dan John to start, which you can find on www.t-nation.com (which is a quality resource in general). Dan John tends to recommend simple, effective strategies, and Waterbury writes a lot addressing your first and second questions.
A great place to start, this article by Mark Rippetoe: http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/most_lifters_are_still_beginners
Eric Cressey and Christian Thibaudeau write great stuff, if you’re into a more complicated approach.
Also I agree strongly with Zed’s point 2.
I agree with Zed’s point 3. about supplements sort of. I think the exceptions are (1) “peri-workout nutrition” about which there are many complex strategies but you can keep it simple, say a whey protein & gatorade shake before or after (or both) your workouts, and (2) things often lacking in a modern diet or lifestyle: fish oil (or some other way to get omega 3) and vitamin D seem to be the most frequent recommendations.
I have a low attention span but I read through your entire document and when I reached the end I was surprised because I had the impression I was still reading the preliminary part. So, for what it’s worth, I found it easy to get through.
Is the insight about free will and logical facts part of the sequences? or is it something you or others discuss in a post somewhere? I’d like to learn about it, but my searches failed.
This sounds familiar to me. I’m 32 and I definitely remember hearing stuff like this. I remember in elementary school (so, late 80s early 90s) seeing the Canada food guide recommend a male adult eat something like up to 10 servings of grains a day, which could be bread or pasta or cereal. You were supposed to have some dairy products each day, maybe 2-4. And maybe 1-3 servings from Meat & Alternates.
I remember that pretty much all fat was viewed (popularly) with caution, at least until Udo Erasmus came out with his book Good Fat, Bad Fat.
But I do recall a clear message that soda and snacks were unhealthy. It wasn’t as though soda was thought ok just because it was low fat / high carb.
Caffeine’s a strong drug for me, except I have a huge tolerance now because I consume so much coffee. One night a few years ago, after I had quit caffeine for about a month, I was picking away at a bag of chocolate almonds while doing homework, and after a few hours I noticed that I felt pretty much euphoric. So yeah, this is good info to have if you’re trying to get off caffeine.
Biotest is very reputable (that’s my impression anyway) for supplements geared towards weightlifters.
https://www.t-nation.com/store
They have stuff in their “Health” category with broader appeal (Superfood is pretty cool). I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve used from them.
Looks to me like Halmos does intend “one-to-one” to mean “injective”. What he writes is “A function that always maps distinct elements onto distinct elements is called one-to-one (usually a one-to-one correspondence).” Then he mentions inclusion maps as examples of one-to-one functions.
I have a foggy memory of someone here (I think it was gwern) linking to an article about simulation interface design. It built up examples based on a bird’s eye view of a car steering down a road. I haven’t been able to find it, anyone know a link to the article?
Thanks a bunch that is the one!
Michael Vassar makes some observations about this in this chat from about 37:50-40:30. He begins describing something called a “hexayurt tridome”, some kind of portable desert structure, and finishes saying “for the cost of engineering the 2016 Toyota Corolla and with the level of engineering skill required to engineer the 2016 Toyota Corolla it would probably be possible to engineer a house that would cost less than a Toyota Corolla and that could be deployed more easily and be adequate for any climate pretty much anywhere in the world where there’s a reasonable amount of free space”.
Eliezer ruminates on foundations and wrestles with the difficulties quite a bit in the Metaethics sequence, for example:
It seems possible to me that after passing some threshold of metaphysics insight, beings in basement reality would come to believe that basement reality simulations have high measure.
Past a certain point, maybe original basement reality beings actually believe they are simulated. Then accurately simulated basement reality beings would mean simulating beings who think (correctly) that they are in a simulation.
I don’t know how to balance such possibilities to figure out what’s likely.
Interesting idea. So I guess that approach is focused on measure across universes with physics similar to ours? I wonder what fraction of simulations have physics similar to one level up. Presumably ancestor simulations would.
Same problem for me. And I agree, seems like it would take a lot of ingenuity to turn a solution to this problem into a viable business. Maybe products aiding rat-race opt-out strategies, coordination tech enabling 20 hour work weeks.… I don’t really have any specific ideas.
But to answer the second question, I feel like I would pay a great deal for something like this. Hard to quantify since solutions offered might be partial, and a total solution might eliminate income, etc.; but just to illustrate (and ignoring things like extreme saving for early retirement, etc.) between the options A. and B. ---
A. $80,000/year at 40 hours a week
B. third party company L somehow enables me to earn $40,000/year at 20 hours a week in the same job with the same employer as above, but company L takes a 25% cut of my pay (so $10,000 a year to company L)
--- I’d gratefully choose option B. (which is just to give a sense of my intuitive preference, not saying I’d defend the merits of that choice necessarily).
I can tell you a reason I’ve cryocrastinated. I don’t expect the reason to hold up under scrutiny. It held up under my half-hearted scrutiny, but so what? I have low confidence in my own ability to be rational. In fact, I’d be grateful if someone can eliminate this worry for me.
So, the reason is concern about dystopian or hellish scenarios. For a cartoon of such a scenario, think I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
One thought I had was that these scenarios are so unlikely that if I felt they warranted avoiding cryonics, I’d also feel they warranted preventative suicide. I’m confused about where I stand on this, but in any case preventative suicide is an action I am absolutely unable to take, whereas not signing up for cryonics is easy.
Thanks if you can straighten this out for me.