Thomas Castriensis

Karma: 33

Thomas Castriensis 5 Apr 2026 13:09 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Mars_Will_Be_Ours’s comment on: The bar is lower than you think
I certainly agree that one of the many effects would be increased competition for existing job opportunities. But wouldn’t more effective job-seeking also result in a more effective allocation of labour? And since capital can be reallocated, both within the country and across borders, wouldn’t this in principle unlock the possibility of full employment?

Thomas Castriensis 5 Apr 2026 11:49 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: XelaP’s comment on: The bar is lower than you think
Thanks, that’s a great list. Honestly, even just using Claude as a sparring partner to work through those points would probably be a major level-up for the average job search.
If you can brainstorm what Light Yagami should do next or whether Batman could guide a tortoise across the U.S. during a zombie apocalypse, then what’s stopping you from brainstorming what John Smith should do next given that he has prep time, is ‘joblusted’, has X preexisting abilities and Y debuffs, etc.
I like this framing and will try it on myself. (Not for job search currently but for other things.)

Thomas Castriensis 4 Apr 2026 9:27 UTC
3 points
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on: The bar is lower than you think
Do you have any thoughts on what this principle would look like when applied to the problem of unemployment?
To vaguely gesture at the kind of thing I’m imagining: “You don’t need a perfect resume to start taking steps towards landing a job you’ll like. You can just do X, which will bring you in contact with people in that field, and if you then do Y… which leads to Z...”
To put a more concrete framing around it, do you think it would be possible for someone so inclined to write a set of instructions (e.g. in a blog post) that:
- if followed, would lead to employment in > 80% of cases in < 100 days
- were simple enough that most healthy adults could understand and execute them if they wanted?
(You can adjust the numbers and other specifics if you like.)
For this thought experiment, entrepreneurship, self-employment, gigs, etc. count as employment if the income exceeds, or is on a trajectory to exceed, unemployment benefits.
This problem has been on my mind a lot lately, with unemployment rates persistently high and still rising in Finland. I’m fortunate in that I’ve not been personally affected (and feel confident I could find a new job if it came to that), but the whole situation is just a colossal waste.

Thomas Castriensis 1 Apr 2026 11:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Thomas Castriensis’s comment on: Adopt a debugger’s mindset to solve your recurring life problems
Update at the first checkpoint – one week of scheduled interventions.
Sticking to the protocol has been easy. Soft (subjective) endpoints are looking quite positive. As for the hard endpoint, the last handful of (~daily) observations have been better than my average over time, but more measurements are needed.
I’ll check back again at the two-week mark.

Thomas Castriensis 31 Mar 2026 20:16 UTC
5 points
2
on: Is Bayesianism Susceptible to the Mail-Order Prophet Scam?
(This is not intended to be “the” Bayesian answer, just my unsophisticated first reaction.)
Even if our unlucky Bayesian doesn’t know about this particular type of scam, shouldn’t we still assume that he believes that
1. various tricks can be played on people, including him, and
2. scammers contacting people with investment-related claims is not rare, and
3. genuine oracles (i.e. accurate stock predictors) contacting people out of the blue happens very rarely if ever?
In that case he would still conclude that it is more likely that he is being fooled (although he doesn’t know how) than that he’s been contacted by a genuine oracle.

Thomas Castriensis 30 Mar 2026 14:43 UTC
1 point
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on: Parkinson’s Law of Worry
I agree about the tendency of smaller worries to expand so as to fill the available space. And it works the other way around too, doesn’t it: newer and bigger worries tend to crowd out older and smaller ones.
When it comes to habitual worrying, I have a pretty hard-line stance; basically, I advocate stopping it altogether. I wrote a post to this effect on Substack a while ago, although, to be honest, it doesn’t really even argue why you should stop worrying but jumps straight into how. I do, of course, recognize there is a value to being vigilant and on guard against unnecessary risks, but I see this as subtly different from worrying.

Thomas Castriensis 29 Mar 2026 14:56 UTC
1 point
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on: Rumination is a habit (and you can break it!)
I think this is exactly the right message. It’s a habit and we don’t have to keep doing it.
Also, reading this, I realized that my web app BetterQualities (which provides guidance for letting go of various unskillful qualities as they arise) actually doesn’t offer any guidance for stopping rumination. That’s quite an omission on my part! (It’s funny that this didn’t occur to me even when I alluded to rumination in the Heedfulness Workouts post...) And since I typically encounter maybe one rumination-causing event per year, I don’t know when I’ll be able to develop and test a method of my own for countering it.
Would you perhaps be open to providing a short, actionable guidance text that would help the app’s users let go of rumination when they experience it? This could be in exchange for, e.g., linking to one or more of your articles from the app and my Substack. If that sounds like something you might consider doing, we can hash out the details over DM.

Thomas Castriensis 29 Mar 2026 9:23 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: becausecurious’s comment on: Heedfulness Workouts
I think those are the right questions to ask, and the answer is, it’s nuanced.
I started the practice in roughly its current form 3 weeks ago. I coined the name about a week ago. My motivation to work out, and indeed the frequency with which I do, has gone up rather than down. (I’m now doing maybe 3–5 workouts a day.) However, the experienced intensity of the workout – the contrast between workout time and non-workout time – has gone down somewhat. I attribute this mostly to three factors:
1. The novelty has worn off.
2. Summoning heedfulness is now easier – both during workouts and outside them. The heedfulness baseline has gone up.
3. Some of the things that initially required focus or willpower now require less. (This is related to point 2. but is more about specific things getting easier – becoming the obvious default behaviour – rather than the tide lifting all boats.)
So while the intensity of the experience has gone down, it hasn’t meant becoming more heedless (i.e. doing stupid things) during workouts – quite the opposite. However, I do think there’s something to be gained by experiencing intensity during a workout from time to time, so I’ve started intentionally cultivating that too.
The triggers for starting a workout are pretty arbitrary, but here are some:
- No particular reason, the thought just occurred to me that I might do one now.
- Feeling unfocused and unproductive, or restless, or tense, and wanting to do better.
- Realizing that there’s a stretch of time ahead where I could get various things done and actually enjoy them.

Thomas Castriensis 26 Mar 2026 11:20 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Declan Molony’s comment on: Adopt a debugger’s mindset to solve your recurring life problems
Absolutely! And that looks like a good addition.
This is day two of working on the issue with specific, scheduled interventions, and I’m already seeing some improvement. I have a calendar checkpoint at the one-week mark to assess how things are progressing.

Thomas Castriensis 26 Mar 2026 5:51 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: MarkelKori’s comment on: Immortality: A Beginner’s Guide (Part 2)
Sure, and I’ll definitely check out the website! I don’t know where to find curated information about business models, but the Longevity Summit Dublin channel on Youtube has a few talks and panel discussions about startups and funding in the longevity space.

Thomas Castriensis 25 Mar 2026 10:27 UTC
1 point
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on: Open Thread Winter 2025/26
Hi! I’m Thomas, nice to meet you all. I’ve been reading LessWrong on and off for years but never got around to posting until recently. (I do occasionally comment at Astral Codex Ten.) I’m interested in rationality as the art of systematized winning.
Things I’ve been thinking about recently include personal mindset/habit transformations and the possibility that such transformations, if embraced by a minority of the population, could produce society-level benefits. Not unrelatedly, I’m thinking about the plight of Europe in general and Finland in particular and how we could change the course of our country and continent.

Thomas Castriensis 25 Mar 2026 9:03 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Declan Molony’s comment on: Adopt a debugger’s mindset to solve your recurring life problems
This is a helpful framing. In fact, listing my actions – both the old unhelpful or insufficient ones and the new, corrective ones – revealed that I hadn’t put numbers on the latter: when and how often I need to take them. (In this case, they happen to be things I can schedule.) They are now in my calendar.

Thomas Castriensis 24 Mar 2026 21:56 UTC
3 points
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on: Adopt a debugger’s mindset to solve your recurring life problems
Thanks. This prompted me to start seriously addressing a recurring issue I wasn’t taking consistent action on. My beliefs about the problem (step A) are still pretty opaque to me, but it was easy enough to think of a couple of things to try.

Thomas Castriensis 23 Mar 2026 16:43 UTC
1 point
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on: Immortality: A Beginner’s Guide (Part 2)
Nice. Will the FAQ stay focused exclusively on arguments for and against life extension, or do you intend to also cover topics like promising approaches and business models for developing them? (The first paragraph of Part 1 seems to allow both interpretations.) Purely as my personal preference, I would be more interested in the latter kind of content, but of course, sticking to a single theme makes sense too.

Thomas Castriensis 18 Mar 2026 9:31 UTC
4 points
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on: Thomas Castriensis’s Shortform
There is a (possibly false) dichotomy in my mind about approaches to overcoming the aversion to starting a task. Namely, it seems that such approaches involve either:
1. Exertion: The aversion resists you, but you push through it with superior force, drawing on motivation, willpower, or self-discipline. Or,
2. Dissolution: You let go of the tension that arises in your body and mind, which amounts to letting go of the aversion. Or, framed differently: you refuse to wrestle with the resistance in the first place; you are, so to speak, not even recognizing its right to step on the mat and challenge you.
As it happens, I’m so particular to the latter category of approaches that when writing about overcoming procrastination, I tend to almost ignore the former. Am I doing it to my detriment? Does “powering through” deserve a fair hearing too?