Hi there!
I’m focused on learning about the different causes of death and how to get rid of them: Viva Immortality!
I am into IT, anti-aging, politics, and more!
I also write over at the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/willa
Join the EAHub professional network and community! You don’t have to rely on LinkedIn to find other EAs for interesting and impactful job opportunities or discussions. https://eahub.org/profile/willa-lambert/
Shortform #101 Conversation experiment: Tabooing $topics after previously discussed for $time
Do you ever find yourself talking at length, sometimes repetitively about the same topic(s)? Do you notice others around you doing similarly? Experiment with tabooing that topic or topics (with consent of your conversation partner(s), of course) for an evening (or whatever your time interval is) and see what happens!
Spur of the moment tonight, I asked my friend after we finished coworking and were hanging out if they wanted to try the conversation topic taboo experiment. They said yes, and that led to us having a few additional really good conversations tonight in addition to the tabooed topic conversations we had had earlier in the night (those were good too, please note that tabooing a topic doesn’t mean a topic is bad necessarily).
I will be proposing this experiment at Virginia Rationalists’ next meetup (tomorrow!) and see how that goes.
Shortform #100 Writing publicly considered beneficial, fun, and not that scary
After writing one hundred shortform posts, writing publicly no longer feels scary and really just feels like a habit more than anything else (especially because the last 33 posts were near daily or daily). A habit I intend to continue as these are fun to write (even when I feel grumpy or hit an ugh field before doing so) and occupy a nice role in my life, plus I love growing my writing & other skills when creating these posts.
I feel a strong desire to write bigger posts than these, but I like having the shortforms as a consistent & foundational habit for regular public writing. Consistency and building foundational habits are of paramount importance, atop such you can build bigger and better things.
Here’s to continuing daily shortforms and growing what is next too!
Shortform #99 Glassblowing, Contemporary Art, & M.C. Escher! | Also, good conversations :)
If Saturday was a stay-in get attention hijacked kind of day, today was a “get the heck out of the house and do something” kind of day. I met up with a friend to visit the Chrysler Art Museum and attended an hourish long glassblowing demonstration which was absolutely fascinating, I loved it! I enjoyed walking around the modernist & contemporary sections of the museum (only stayed for a few hours so I didn’t go to all parts of the museum this time around), had a few decidedly new experiences during that and found those pleasant.
The M.C. Escher exhibit was amazing, perspective altering as expected, and inspiring :) Expressing mathematical and/or physics concepts via art is a beautiful thing, I want to see more of that.
After visiting the museum, I went to my favorite cafe and sat at the cafe’s big round table by a window. I studied some, but mostly had conversations with several different people throughout the day. Getting into intellectual conversations with strangers is truly enjoyable, you never know what you may learn or concepts you may be introduced to.
During the evening, I met with a friend & coworked for an hour before hanging out. That was a very productive hour, wow do I have much left to do after the Retreat and yet more for organizing to do. I love that work so much though, it’s great :) My friend & I had excellent conversations after working, I’m glad we met up and look forward to the next time!
I do not have a desk in my office yet, and use my desktop while sitting on the floor. My foot fell asleep while writing this lol. That happens a fair bit, but it’s okay, I shall acquire desks soon hopefully and have a proper setup once again.
Shortform #98 Visual media consumption considered enjoyable but net harmful for now
In shortform #89 I declared another media diet. That diet ended yesterday evening so I tried out a TV show, Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” on netflix. Which...promptly hijacked my attention from last night until the afternoon of today. I came across LRNZ’s “Golem” for free on Wednesday last week at my local cafe hangout, took it home, and devoured it in one sitting. I could keep listing examples, on and on...of all the times some visual media (digital or analog) has so utterly hacked my attention that I abandoned all else in favor it...but that list would be ridiculously long.
Friction increasing or other interventions around visual media consumption that work well for me:
Video games: if the playtime is with a group of others and scheduled in advance, that poses no issues & maximises my enjoyment of the time (I don’t usually like playing video games alone anymore).
Movies: going over to a friend’s house or a theater makes this totally fine. I may also be okay with limiting to one per week because honestly I just don’t watch movies very much.
What I simply have to ban, unfortunately:
TV shows
YouTube videos or similar but from other platforms
Three exceptions: Video is from work & required to watch. Video is educational / from ROSE for a workshop. Video is short and was sent directly to me by a friend.
What I am uncertain about but likely need to ban:
Webcomics, manga, visual novels, comics
I don’t engage with such media very often, but when I have, they’ve been very hijack-y. A blanket ban with exception for reading set amount of chapters or arcs per time interval with a group is probably the best bet.
After experiencing attention hacking or hijacking, my mood tends to crater, my mind is unfocused & hazy or a bit...loose (see yesterday’s shortform for a great example of that), and I feel bad about the time spent. Not guilt per se, more of a melancholy feeling about having missed out on more enjoyable non-hijacking activities.
So! Back to a media diet starting tomorrow 7 August and lasting through 10 September this year.
Shortform #97 Frames, paradigms, priors, concept space, oh my!
I am obsessed with such things ^^^^. What are ideas, how do they work? When you reduce until everything is just axioms, why do you build what you build on top of those axioms? <<<< mostly rhetorical questions, though sometimes they can be nice to meditate on.
Thank goodness for reality, not only is existence a lovely thing, but the territory provides a great foundation upon which to build maps. And then there’s Math.
I don’t expect this post to make any coherent sense to others, it’s for me, it makes sense for me. Back to watching Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” on Netflix now that my media diet has concluded. If you’ve read this, I hope you’re doing well, salud! What concepts are you obsessed with?
Shortform #96 Operating Systems Rant Number Infinity
Much like you need a kernel (usually in most cases, anyways) to run an operating system...this rant needs a foundation: use-cases for operating systems; the principle of charity & steelmanning shall apply here. Note that this is focused on desktop operating systems, not mobile operating systems. Don’t take this too seriously, I have some thoughts about the OSes I use and need to get them out, this is by no means polished or seriously researched.
Microsoft Windows
The inescapable behemoth that is Windows ate the business world and continues doing so. What do most businesses love & need for the technologies they use? Iron-clad support contracts with enforceable SLAs, and the software does most of what they need most of the time and is mostly stable. The easiest way to make a living working with computers during the last two decades (minus possibly being a programmer) was (and for now too, is) to support Windows as an OS & the whole Microsoft ecosystem or products.
Video games: Yes you can game on Linux, macOS, and even BSDs, and yes consoles exist, but playing video games is synonymous with Windows for a reason: compatibility, enterprise support, & mindshare.
Apple macOS
Beautiful hardware, beautiful software. The magic box that “just works”. Found for a reason in creative industries and often is the OS + hardware of choice for developers. macOS is usually more stable than Windows, has Unix roots that still persist to this day, and Apple’s customer support experience is incredibly good compared to other technology companies.
Tight integration between hardware & software: not quite as a fully general rule...but usually the more optimized an OSes codebase is for the hardware it runs on, the better your experience using said OS will be, at least from a performance standpoint. This feels true of macOS, it is a more stable and smoothly responsive OS to use from my experience than any other OS I’ve used, even a lightweight Linux distro (responsive, but not smooth). Also, Macs tend to last a long time and usually are a better capital expenditure than PCs; six years of full software support on average and then a few years of security updates, and usually still a decently functioning if outdated computer that can run other operating systems if needed (I’m bullish on ARM Mac laptops being able to run Linux or even Windows in 2-5 years; Apple has not made that verboten and many people are interested in enabling such support).
GNU / Linux distributions
Freedom.
I have old computers and love that I can still make productive use of them for modern tasks if I run a Linux distro, this is great.
This section is deliberately shorter than macOS or Windows, I love GNU / Linux distributions, the free software philosophy, yes also the open source software philosophy, and the vision of how the world could or ought to be that is embedded in how Linux distributions feel to use. No, perhaps not the OS family for everyone, and there are definite issues where certain usecases easily supported on macOS or Windows are just honestly terrible on Linux distributions.
BSD Unixes
Freedom.
Open source cathedral design as opposed to the bazaar design of GNU / Linux distributions; see The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond. I love a well designed & tightly integrated system and find that the BSD Unixes (i.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) might just supply a better designed & more stable experience than most if not all GNU / Linux distributions. I’m still learning & growing with BSDs so I have a ways to go, but so far I like BSD better than Linux from a purely technical perspective.
Commercial Unixes
Stability & enterprise support.
I am mostly mentioning this category to note that it exists, but I have no experience with commercial desktop Unixes, only a few server or mainframe Unixes that I got to log into and poke around in a few times (mostly IBM’s AIX).
Chrome OS
I’ve used this some, it’s a really cool concept, but I personally could not use it as anything other than a test OS or to learn another OS paradigm on because of privacy concerns. I do think Chrome OS is doing good things for computing accessibility for many many many people though, and it’s an amazingly secure operating system too, that’s good.
Now with my perceived use-cases or commentary on desktop operating systems laid out...why am I writing this? Mostly for personal reflection and to think out loud about the impact of operating systems in my life and why I find them so fascinating.
I want an OS with the freedom of GNU / Linux & BSDs, the security of Chrome OS, the versatility, compatibility, & enterprise support of Windows, and the beauty, integration, and optimization of macOS.
I’m not sure that OS exists or ever will, but if it’s ever created, I’ll be there to use it & possibly contribute to it too.
I like operating systems, they are fun things :) Computers are eminently useful prosthetics for us humans, and I’m happy to be alive during this era with them. Though (nods at AI Safety, political & sociological issues caused by computing technologies, and a few other things), they are not without their risks if not properly created, governed, & used.
Happy Computing y’all :)
Shortform #95 The Feeling of Focusing & Attentiveness
At any given moment, where is the full weight of your attention targeted at? Or is your attention partial, divvied up amongst several targets?
I’m deliberately reducing the amount of noticed occurrences where my attention is partial rather than full. Undivided focus or attentiveness not only makes experiencing existence more satisfying for me, it also sharpens my cognition because I single task instead of multitask. That sharpness benefits me by reducing biases, making my heuristics more transparent & noticeable, and generally increases my capability to derail cached thinking in favor of more context-aware, more up to date & accurate thinking.
What does attentiveness feel like? What does it feel like from the inside to be fully focused & single-tasked? I feel a sharply noticeable difference in my body between divided & undivided attention:
Divided attention fatigues me, makes me feel guilty if I’m actively listening to someone or in a conversation, and gives me a “lurching back and forth as if pulled simultaneously in conflicting directions” feeling in my body (literally I’ll feel “moved in one direction” in one part of my body or head & “moved in another direction” in other areas.
Full attention feels razor sharp, it feels competent, it feels natural, it makes my embodiment feel very good, and I feel completely oriented in the same direction at the same time.
I’m curious about how emotional states, embodied feelings & states of being, and focus affect cognition, because I think these things are highly significantly impactful on the quality of one’s cognitive processes & capabilities to be accurate with one’s cognition.
Shortform #94 Boundary Setting at work is suddenly much easier after attending Retreat
Prior to attending the organizer’s retreat, I would let people send me tasks that fell outside of my primary responsibilities, even if they were mundane and not good learning opportunities and/or even if the individual in question actually had time to do the task. After the retreat, I noticed today, I haven’t been doing that and have been saying no much more often, or enforcing better boundaries generally about work tasks.
I’m not sure what changed. My current job admittedly isn’t more than 50-60% aligned with what sparks joy for me and brings about the most professional growth for me. But also, perhaps seeing how much the virtue of consistency was reinforced at retreat and talked about combined with my work mentor strongly emphasizing that too helped me integrate that virtue more deeply. I want to be consistently great at fulfilling my primary responsibilities at work, and doing so requires eliminating distractions or extraneous / not germane tasks & time sinks. Most of what colleagues try to pass off to me doesn’t fall within my primary responsibilities, so perhaps I am now feeling that distinction between primary & secondary or tangential responsibilities more intensely?
Another item heavily emphasized at retreat was time management and how much a person is committing to certain activities or responsibilities: being deliberate about such things matters! I knew logically before that that matters, but perhaps had not emotionally or unconsciously integrated that to a significant enough effect.
Hmm...another factor: I feel much more acutely the limits of “hours in a day” and total healthy life hours in a life that one can use for work now than I did prior to the retreat. That is likely part of the equation.
Yet another factor (why so many?): I felt motivated to find ways to apply what I learned at the retreat to my job, e.g. the workshop on how to recruit a guest speaker to your meetup felt eerily applicable to the process of contacting other teams at work for assistance. I also deliberately chose not to frame returning home as “returning to normalcy, or the mundane world” as I feel that framing is harmful. I wanted there to be no serious distinctions between “the world” as I experienced “the world” at the retreat vs how I experienced “the world” at home and at my job. It’s the same world, the same reality, just with different responsibilities, people, commitments, etc. Instead, I felt and still feel that I would rather work to optimize and improve local situations so that I could generate similar levels of fun, excitement, learning, and growth at home & at work as I did while at the retreat. That was such a distinctly different way of framing returning home than the “mundane” framing that I’ve felt somewhat like a substantially different person because now I’m operating with a better perspective & framing in my home & work lives, local life, etc. I feel optimistic about the local future, eager to learn, eager to grow, and a relentless drive to improve everything around me & my life.
I now believe that frameworks or perspectives of mundanity to be harmful & trigger spirals of bad things. Each moment experienced is different than every other moment if you look at the world with fresh or beginner’s eyes. My priors for the state of affairs around me no longer are warped by the mentally colonizing framework of mundanity.
Shortform #93 Timeboxing
I am loving spending so much time doing organizing work, it’s genuinely fun and feels great! I do have other interests and prior commitments + goals to attain though, so I need to be more deliberate with my time. I’m once again heavily relying on my calendar (Google Calendar for now) to restrict certain activities mostly to specific boxes of time on the calendar. This is helping. I attended to other goals & commitments today while still doing organizing work.
There’s so much work to do for so many of my interests & parts of my life. Here’s to timeboxing and managing it all a bit better!
Norfolk Rationalists is now officially Virginia Rationalists. If you want to organize meetups in Virginia please reach out, I’m happy to help you with that.
Cheers,
Willa
Shortform #92 Woohoo for Organizing :)
Houston Rationalists now have an in-person local organizer! Thank you David M for organizing, I look forward to seeing how the group grows and supporting how I can from afar.
Norfolk Rationalists will become Virginia Rationalists this week! We are still meeting in Norfolk, but the name change should reduce confusion amongst people I or others speak to about the group. Plus, I would like to provide infrastructure & support to organizers in other parts of Virginia and support as many Virginia groups as possible, let’s share the infrastructure & management costs (time, money, and energy) associated with such things.
Today marks four years on estrogen, woohoooooo!! Happy HRT cakeday me :)
Still quite a few items on my post-retreat ToDo, but I’m working through them and making progress. I am enjoying that work quite a bit, it’s fun and rewarding.
Shortform #91 Winning as an Individual: thoughts
I believe that winning is important & necessary. At least four elements contribute to individual winning:
Community
Humans are social animals, loneliness kills, and “reaching one’s highest potential” is facilitated by membership in a value-aligned motivated & ambitious community (e.g. “it takes a village”, “paypal mafia”, or “manhattan project”).
Cognition
See essentially the whole idea of the Rationalist community, heuristics & biases research, understanding thought processes & building better ones, using deliberate practice to improve cognitive habits, logical analysis, and intellectual rigor. Well trained cognitive skills & habits are imperative for winning at many things humans pursue.
Emotions
What do you shy away from that is holding you back? What ideas do you drift towards and why? What emotional baggage seeps into your cognition and subtly infects not only the conclusions you proclaim but even your priors & frameworks of thought? Are you too anxious around other people and struggle being a member of a community? You must know yourself & come to thorough understanding regarding your emotions and how they influence you, otherwise you may fail before you even start.
Wellness
Human beings who are not in good health nor in good physical shape are negatively impacted by those states of being: eating well, being in good health, and high physical fitness are of paramount importance for optimizing one’s cognition, and are useful too for improving emotional states, all of which are helpful for one’s membership & status in a community. This is not to say that a person can’t do well or even thrive if the conditions mentioned here for wellness are not met, rather...not being at peak or very high wellness IS applying negative pressure against their thriving.
I intend to flesh out those four elements of winning more & turn them into a proper post. If you’ve read this, any feedback, comments, or suggestions? I will be using the elements of winning as guides when creating my meetup group’s dojo. I did not mention why I think winning is so important as I take winning as a given good, but I suspect pointing at a few reasons why might be helpful for readers so I’ll include that in the post.
In other news, I will be playing a Kenku Artificer Artillerest in an upcoming D&D campaign and am excited for that, looks like a lot of fun :)
Upcoming announcements for Norfolk Rationalists & Houston rationalists should occur tomorrow for at least one announcement, with the rest hopefully produced by midweek at the latest.
Shortform #90 I changed the title more than five times so this is now the title.
Tonight I keep writing sentences and deleting them. Not sure that’s the most fruitful state of mind to write with, but I shall do so anyways.
I believe that the adrenaline or excitement which propelled me through the week after returning from the organizer’s retreat has finally worn off. I’m very sleepy and have been very unfocused tonight (which is in stark contrast to how well I performed at work today, I was very focused & on top of things), scattered, and a bit drift-y. Sleeping in tomorrow plus hanging out with my neighbor & later my family sound like nice things, I’ll do those and a few other things (yet more retreat debriefing / idea integration and reaching out to people) tomorrow.
For now though, it is time to rest well and wake tomorrow fresh for the new day!
Shortform #89 Consistency Matters
I did not write a shortform yesterday, which broke my ~20 day long daily shortform writing streak. Back to it I go, starting a new streak with #89 :)
What do I get out of writing daily shortforms?
I keep a general (though sometimes detailed) log of my daily activities, feelings, thoughts, and experiences which helps me in a few ways: emotional processing, serving as a memory prosthetic, and discussing things I find interesting.
I increase how comfortable writing publicly feels to me.
I practise the art of short blog post writing on a regular basis
I practise consistency. A habit or virtue I wish to strengthen & improve at.
I stay centered, focused, less likely to veer off in some wild direction: deliberate, written out reflection time everyday is immensely helpful!
I’ve struggled with time & prioritization since returning to work on Wednesday. I’m so happy I made time to hangout with my co-organizer for Norfolk Rationalists on Tuesday, we had fun, and I was glad to share some of the huge amount of things that I learned from the organizer’s retreat. I want to meet again soon to share more of that knowledge so we can finish that debriefing, integrate the lessons learned into our plans, and build Norfolk Rationalists into a bigger & better community group that also has a separate productivity focused group (dojo). Similarly, there are so many messages in the organizer’s discord or direct messages I want to reply to or send to people I met, but haven’t had the time yet since returning to work. I suspect I’ll spend a lot of this weekend continuing the debriefing, integrating more lessons learned, and reaching out to so many people from retreat & elsewhere, plus contributing back to the broader pool of knowledge all us organizer’s are building since the retreat.
I’m doing another video related content intake diet: From 29 July, 2022 through 5 August, 2022 I will not watch TV shows or YouTube, nor play video games without scheduling them first and only if during that play session I’ll be playing with friends and hanging out in voice comms with them. I am allowing myself to watch two movies during this time period. Exceptions allowed for Guild of the ROSE video workshop content (if any), work related duties as strictly necessary, and if a friend wants to show me something in-person.
Shortform #88 Retreat Debriefing & Staying in Touch | I will review some AI Safety literature
Today was a bifurcated day, I spent the morning and early afternoon dealing with the remnants of travelling (picking up my car from my local airport and then my baggage from an airport an hour away from home because that’s where my connecting flight had been routed to last night after the initial one was unexpectedly cancelled) then finally made it to my apartment to shower & recombobulate.
I met with my Norfolk Rationalists co-organizer (shoutout Yitz!!! https://www.lesswrong.com/users/yitz) to essentially debrief and share as much knowledge I gained from the organizer’s retreat as possible. We had many lovely conversations and have concrete actions planned for growing & strengthening the Norfolk Rationalists community. More on that another time, there will be announcements.
I enjoyed reaching out & saying hi to other organizers to check on how their travel went, what they are up to. Many more people to go, if you haven’t heard from me and were at the retreat you should soon, I met and remember almost every organizer there (had at least a 5-10 minute conversation with 90%-95% or so of attending organizers).
Several individuals much more knowledgeable about AI Alignment than myself recommended that I check out Coherent Extrapolated Volition and clarified why I need to familiarize myself with existing AI Alignment research a bit more before I go off and do an in-depth analysis of political values re: AI Alignment. Yitz and I will be reviewing that original article & associated content then publish our review of the idea after determining how well it holds up regarding values determination. This and other AI Safety / Alignment work will take place at upcoming local meetup / coworking sessions in Norfolk separate from the Norfolk Rationalists group (as that is an exclusively social group). Looking forward to increasing my AI Alignment knowledge & helping how I can.
Back to my day-job tomorrow, decently looking forward to that in addition to everything else.
Shortform #102 Consistent sleep & wake times experiment
I’m tired of being tired so much during the day, to an extent that is genuinely life & job performance interfering. Time to improve my sleep quality & habits!
I commit to this experiment for one month, the experiment begins tomorrow 11 August, 2022. The experiment will be reevaluated on September 11, 2022. I will be asleep by 10pm each night and awake at 6am each morning, no exceptions for weekends or holidays.
Happy for any suggestions or comments about other ways to improve sleep quality too, I am okay with trying them concurrently with this experiment, because solving my tiredness during the day problem is vitally important to me. I don’t think I can afford a sleep study right now, but that is an assumption I haven’t fully checked yet (here’s another todo item).