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Why not? I'd recommend at least giving it a whirl and seeing if you like it. Especially web programming.
Someone with your mental abilities could find (web) programming enjoyable, useful, and perhaps even profitable, so don't write it off too soon.
From personal experience I agree with all those bullet points, and wish to add one more: having the ability to write simple computer programs can be extremely useful in other information-related endeavors. Next time you or one of your friends is burning a lot of time doing a repetetive task on a computer, wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn an hours-long task into the work of 15 minutes with a simple script?
Many organizations heavily rely on computers for their day-to-day business, yet do not understand how to take advantage of them to reduce required human effort.
Kill boring work: become an amateur computer programmer.
Becoming an amateur computer programmer takes quite a bit of work, but at least it's not boring work.
So, I have a forgotten year of C++ under my belt and I can work with HTML and CSS. What exactly goes into web programming? I was imagining it'd be a few months studying CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Python, MySQL, PHP, Django, that Google Apps language, et cetera, and it just sounded like a lot of work. Also, I've had 2 occasions where I spent a few hours looking for resources to help with a problem and I just had to give up, which is hella frustrating. I couldn't get processing.js to work which sucked 'cuz I'd written up this cool thing in Processing and figured it'd be really easy to work into a website I'd designed, and I felt stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid. I mean if I'm chilling with SIAI folk then I guess I might as well take advantage of their knowledge and pick up some web programming (especially since it's really just fun in the first place), but... I dunno, it feels like there's this big unknown gap between me and being a below-average web programmer, and I don't like being below-average at anything, let alone having to work hard to become below-average. Hence I also avoid learning math, even though I know I really should learn more.
It really depends on what someone needs you to do. There are a few different approaches to web programming, which include different workflows and different ways of breaking up who does what. Generally, most things on the web can be broken up into "front end" and "back end", which change meaning based on context. "Front end" can usually be divided into "design" and "implementation [or] programming". "Back end" can usually be divided into server administration, the database, and programming.
I work at a small firm (in person) and so do both front-end and back-end programming, but usually someone will specialize in one or the other or some aspect of it. For folks condemned to work in the world of Microsoft, there is usually a lot of complicated technical work to interface various proprietary Microsoft technologies using abstract frameworks on the back end.
The traditional back-end setup in the Unix world is what used to be called LAMP (back when people felt the need to call it something) - a machine with a Linux OS running the Apache web server and MySQL database engine, with Perl (/PHP/etc) serving up dynamic pages.
On the front end, you basically have a web page crafted using HTML (usually served via some complicated method from the back end) as well as whatever the user-agent is going to let you get away with. In practice, depending on the application, you will use HTML for the page's semantic structure, CSS for style and layout of the HTML, and Javascript for dynamic content on the front end, often employing a library like JQuery to abstract away browser quirks or JQuery-ui to add user-interface functionality. Plugins like Flash might also be used to create dynamic content with a more consistent user experience.
It's really impossible to prepare ahead of time for whatever web development job someone might need done, and there are gurus who are experts at any particular one of the technologies above, so it's a little tricky to set out trying to find a niche to fit yourself into. I can do anything we randomly decide to get involved in at my job, but I still don't fit the bill for a lot of the job postings out there because I have no reason to study the technologies used on Microsoft servers, and I hardly ever use Flash since Javascript is actually almost as useful these days, and we've never seen a reason to work seriously with Ruby or Python since they do so miserably in benchmarks against our old standby Perl (or C if we really need performance) and we're not popping out unique web apps on a daily basis that would need a complicated framework (like Ruby on Rails) to abstract away a lot of the work at the expense of performance.
The real trick is staying good at web development. Aside from graphics and games, the web is the main computing frontier where things are constantly changing and improving so constant study and practice is needed to stay ahead of the curve.
I'm pretty confused about back end programming. I figured it was possible to just let other people handle that for you, like Heroku or some other hosting service where you don't have to worry... but I'm totally in over my head here, is that not how that works? I guess if I got into web programming I'd want to focus as much as possible on the front end, designing things and trying to worry as little as possible about optimizing data structures and the like.
Back end programming just means the programming of what you want your site to actually do, as opposed to how you want it to look. i.e. it's the part that actually qualifies as "programming" (coders really hate it when web designers refer to web design as "programming").
If you're just setting up a web site based on an existing code base (like how LW is based on the reddit code), then there may not be any back end programming that needs to be done. But if you're actually creating something original, somebody needs to actually write the code to make it do what you want it to do.
Like say we were trying to create LW from scratch. You've laid out all your HTML and CSS and images and whatnot for how you want everything to LOOK. But there are all these buttons and stuff, like the "Create New Article" button in the top right. You can lay out where that button is and what it looks like, but what actually happens when a user clicks on it? That's where back end programming comes in - probably you respond to the click by creating a new row in an article table in your database, which has a schema you've created, specifying all the fields that need to appear - the article content, the article author, timestamp, maybe the article karma would get stored there too. Then it generates from that a stub article which it passes back to the frontend which then decorates it and renders it for the user.
And then of course there would have to be code written to handle commenting and the karma system. Those would probably be stored in their own db tables with their own schemas you've designed, and you'd have to write the code that takes a user action, like clicking "comment' or "vote up" and actually doing something with that, incrementing the comment's karma count by one and storing that back to the database.....
...thats's back end programming. And as you can see, its definitely not something a hosting provider could just do for you, cause it's very specific to your site and what exactly you want your site to do.
Sorry for being rambly and incoherent.... i took an ambien about a half hour ago and am in that ambien half asleep/half awake/half stoned state
Thanks, I'm significantly less confused now, and back end programming now sounds like fun.
It's a lot of fun. Now you're making me whimsical! ;)
Hmuh, this is intimidating. I was gonna pick up some PHP but to actually use it for a project I'll need MySQL and for that I'll need to set up an Apache web server of some kind... which is intimidating, and I'm probably approaching this the wrong way, especially as I'm not sure yet what I'd even be scripting for. Also I feel alienated as a Windows user; I have Ubuntu but it's frickin' annoying sometimes. How do most people get started with this whole hacker thing?
EDIT: Eff it, I'll switch to Linux and play with Django, it seems easiest. Stupid Linux.
There is essentially no reason to bother with PHP these days. It's a relic and you'd end up having to learn all sorts of arbitrary distracting things.
I can empathise with the intimidation. There was a whole heap of linux administration stuff that I had to pick up to get started. Fortunately, you don't need to do anything like that any more and it can be even easier on windows! You can install the whole stack (ie. Ruby, Rails, apache and mysql) all at once. From there you can just find a tutorial to follow then start copy and pasting stuff from similar applications till you have one that does what you want. (You didn't hear 'develop by cut and paste and google' from me! ;))
RubyStack is one option. The one I have used is InstantRails. I think that one is getting out of date (about a year old) but it probably doesn't make any difference for your purposes.
I don't know what the options are for other web development frameworks. I'm sure there is something simple out there for Python somewhere but I just haven't had reason to look into it.
So if you wanted to get started it is easy enough. Depends on your interest.
When I have something I want to do I go do it. Sometimes that means learning stuff like programming. Sometimes it means learning pharmacology. That's probably the underlying spirit behind the 'hacker' mindset.
I rather like PHP. Examples of "arbitrary distracting things"?
Thanks! Ruby looks good, but I know more Python/Django folk, so it's tempting to leave Windows for a bit. I guess I'll start with the RubyStack and see what I can build. I'm guessing a lot of the basic skills I need are transferable to Django development anyway.
I am not a web developer, but as a Linux user of 15 years let me explain why it might not be as bad as you think.
Get any old computer and put Linux, Apache, MySQL on it. (Those softwares require very little in the way of hardware resources unless you are serving 100s or simultaneous users.) Network the Linux machine with your Windows machine. Even better if your Windows machine has enough memory, run Linux on a virtual machine on Windows. I do not know what the cool kids are using these days in the way of virtualization software, but VMWare would work.
Use a web browser on Windows to test your web app of course.
Editing of text files (mostly config file for Apache, etc) on the Linux box or Linux virtual machine can probably be done using whatever text editor you already use on Windows though I do not know the details of how to set that up in any editor other than Emacs. (For Emacs I would probably use the FTP protocol. The SMB and NFS protocols are alternatives.)
True, you will probably need to interact with a shell on the Linux box or the Linux virtual machine occasionally (using something like PuTTY on Windows), but this way saves you the trouble of having to learn anything about Linux's graphical user interfaces. The good thing about the shell is that it lends itself very well to textual tutorials, with the result that there are 10s of 1000s of blog posts and web pages describing in exact detail how to do stuff in the shell. I would be happy to answer questions by email about the shell, but I do not know about Apache or MySQL.
This way of working with Linux -- by establishing connections to it with browsers, text editors, FTP clients and ssh clients like PuTTY on Windows is very common.
Everything I have described is the worst-case scenario. You can probably either install Apache, MySQL, etc on Windows like wedrifid says or avail yourself of some online service that will host the software for you and allow you to configure and administer it using a web interface.
What Microsoft is actually good at is linking front and back end. People can pretty much take the mouse, pull an SQL table on a website and have all the CRUD generated for them and it works. The open source / linux world with its strong focus on the separation of concerns and modular architecture is very good for the kind of projects where you want to build with scalability in mind and you don't mind not getting immediate results.
Microsoft (ASP.NET and many other products) is for a different philosophy or situation. For example you work at a business where the boss figures out it would be good if we would have a central database of ours customer contacts instead of salespeople just keeping business cards of their contacts in their briefcases and phones. But it is not good to put it into the accounting software because that is desktop based and besides you don't want to buy expensive licences for the salesies. So you volunteer to solve it even though you never even saw ASP.NET, but you watch an 1 hour tutorial, make that one table, pull that on the website, sort out the authentication, and you have an application. Then as the new and new requests keep rolling you keep googling and learning how to do them. In two years you are an expert in ASP.NET and you have a complicated app with 100 tables. (And usually an utter mess and you probably will need to make up a bullshit excuse to be allowed to rewrite clean.)
So... Microsoft is for the cases when you want something immediately useful, and then it will just grow organically out of it, and you learn while doing it. Open source is when you already know how to, you have a project with plans and designs, and you don't need something immediately useful.
You are 18. You evidently have some degree of ambition. (Even 'wanting to do little net work to live comfortably' is an ambition that some wouldn't even consider.) You will need to learn things. Especially if you don't go down the mainstream route of drifting through school getting some piece of paper that says you are qualified and then doing things that will keep a boss from firing you. Making your own way takes effort and rather a lot of independent motivation.
I'd rather not. Walmart sounds better. My ambition is to maximize the chance of existential win. This post wasn't really about me. I'll be fine doing whatever. I already have job opportunities, and anyway, I'm pretty Buddhist. Homelessness suits me fine. Money would be great, but there are lots of skills I'd like to develop before I develop moneymaking skills.
My observation is general. 'Money for survival' is close to the minimum ambition that will require (emotionally) hard work, and learning and doing things you seriously suck at that will make you feel stupid. Maximising the chance of existential win is far, far greater. This is why observations such as those are useful in as much as they are identifying a problem that may need to be worked around.
This is one of the most prevalent forms of self sabotage in existence.
Right, so I attack that problem, because I must. I've picked up skills before, it's not a general problem for me. I'm good at a lot of things. I brag about it way more than I should. I just don't like learning things these days unless the payoff seems good enough. 'Learning to code' doesn't seem all that worth it when there are lots of other more direct things I could be doing, like studying the neurobiology and chemistry behind the mechanisms of nootropics.
And then, of course you can collaborate with me. I've got programming skills, know enough stats to get by and am now studying pharmacology and more statistics. Since I'm typically drawn to the technical side of things and also probably better at making money than neurochemistry I'll quite probably end up just making enough money to employ folks to research the interesting stuff. At least that is my plan.
To me, it sounds like web programming fits the bill of the type of skill that you say you want. The only question is whether it will be worth the effort to get through the learning curve (though you can basically get started doing stuff very fast), and dealing the frustration of problems that take time to solve.
I really have no idea how well the benefits and costs will match up to other things you can spend your time on, but it does seem that web programming skills could be an asset for your effort in the domains of nootropics and existential risk reduction. Here are a few random ideas that web programming could help you implement:
Every cause wants to be a cult... and also have a sweet website.
This is true. I actually have a lot of fun programming (when it's going well), and especially when I get to throw in graphics design stuff. (I really like nautiluses, so I wrote this script in Processing that made a photoshopped and edited nautilus lazily follow my mouse pointer around... it was sooooooo cute. Ahem.) I think I'll pick it up, but do so during the 'fun' hours of my day.
Kid, hate to break it to ya, but have you looked at all the studies about nootropics?
There are "veerrrryy few" done in normal healthy adults. Their actual effects, are very contradictory, and not that great. Sure, there are a few glowing reports about it....but there are also a great deal of "this is bunk"
Even those studies done in rats and the elderly have few solid and stable results. They are often different for each study.
As a good rule, anything that works is either illegal or prescription, or there is a movement to make it illegal(like salvia) Why? Because, stuff that works, the word gets around quickly. Quickly enough, that worried parents and politicians with ambition find out about it too.
A statistically-significant number of people I know have had significant effects from piracetam. The vast majority of this group were very familiar with other mind-altering substances and could therefore probably be trusted to distinguish actual effects from pure placebo.
I don't think that's a good argument against itsunder9000: I've seen plenty of supposedly sophisticated people who you would expect to be able to distinguish from placebo advocate things which did not do jack for me in my own blinded or randomized experiments.
For example, the people who praise LSD microdosing have generally taken more psychedelics than I've even heard of; and what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? No effects (1 trend toward benefit, 1 trend towards harm). Seth Roberts had been self-experimenting for decades longer than I have, and believed that treadmill usage benefited his spaced repetition performance; what happened when I did a randomized self-experiment while skeptical? Statistically-significant harm to my spaced repetition performance, the opposite of what this sophisticate's introspection told him. Seth Roberts thought vitamin D at night hurt his going to sleep and taken in the morning, improved his awakening the next morning; what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? I found that he was right about the first thing, and wrong about the second (no benefit). And so on.
I didn't believe that much in the placebo effect before I started blind self-experiments. But I sure as heck do now.
(That said, I don't necessarily agree with itsunder9000. Big clinical medical trials are in unhealthy old adults, yes, but the psychology trials are usually done with that white lab rat of psychology - college students. And there are a few nootropics with enough studies to have some confidence in the claims.)
It's definitely not a knockdown argument, it's true. It's mostly a large pile of circumstantial evidence that makes me slow to doubt it's effectiveness.
Piracetam has a reputation for being subtle. That doesn't mean it's not working (aspirin's effects are subtle too), but it does mean that in the absence of at least semi-rigorous experiments, it's hard to distinguish from placebo even for people who're skeptical and experienced with psychoactives.
Gwern's experience suggests a small effect.
One friend of mine (neuropsych major, experienced with a wide variety of psychoactives) got similar but slightly stronger results with what I think was over a slightly longer period than gwern; I think he posted his results only on Facebook, though, so I'm not comfortable sharing a link to his writeup.
And anecdotally, a wide sample of people at the college found other placebos not giving the same benefit; every finals week a large table of food and mostly-placebos is available via a student group, and enough people swore by piracetam over the others that when it disappeared in a particular year (it's sale got somehow regulated), its absence was missed.
Two pieces of advice which work for me; your mileage may vary.
1) Let the projects drive the education, not vice versa. Learn languages and language features when you have a way to apply them immediately; you'll remember them better.
2) Make sure you can run the code before you write the code. ;)
Yeah, this kind of stuff. You will mainly need a web programming language and probably a framework. HTML is pretty simple, and CSS isn't a big deal, though it's quirky. You don't really need to know much about MySQL or Javascript to get going. (Learning database concepts will be useful later, but the skill also gives you a good payoff because it will teach you some ways of statistical thinking.) You will also eventually need some Linux.
But you only need a bit of knowledge in some of these areas to start making stuff and start having fun. HTML + CSS that you already know + programming language and maybe framework + follow very basic instructions to set up a MySQL database.
Yes, this will happen in programming. Sometimes a session of programming will be like banging your head against a brick wall until it breaks, then moving over a few inches and banging your head against another spot in the wall.
Documentation + Google is your friend. Most problems I run into that I can't immediately solve myself can be solved within a few minutes of Googling. Of course, it helps when it's typical web programming problems that already have like a million people on the internet asking the same question as you. Just try something, Google the error message, try what it says, then Google the next error message until there are no more errors and things are working. I can do things I've never done before very fast that way.
Many problems will take several hours to solve. Some will take days to solve. When you spend all that time stuck on exactly the same thing, then it's frustrating, especially if when you solve it, it turns out to be something stupid like a typo or a badly documented quirk of a function or something. For me, that's the exception, not the rule. Even when working on a tough problem that takes a long time to solve, I'm typically making progress along the way. When the problem turns out to not be something stupid or obvious that I missed, then it's a really nice feeling of accomplishment when you solve it. Variable reinforcement schedule, and all that. It's a great feeling to finally solve a challenging problem that took you days, when you were never even sure if you could solve it.
The result is that how you feel about programming depends a lot on where you are in your current problem-solving cycle.
I think it's possible that you've been a bit too hard on yourself, and not given yourself enough time to see what programming is like and assess your aptitude and enjoyment for it.
This is standard when you're attempting to teach yourself programming and you're still an apprentice. There's no shame in it. Get over yourself and post on IRC and forums for help when you're having a problem that Google hasn't been able to help you with after 10 minutes. Or I'd be happy to tutor you. Especially if you'll let me work on whatever I want to work on and just explain everything I'm doing to you and make you do some bits so you'll learn stuff. I really want to try this (I suspect my psychology is such that I would experience very strong motivation from this.)
Oh yeah, so far I've given like 3-5 people programming lessons and all of them were hesitant at first but afterwards said they had a great time and learned faster than just about anything they'd learned in their life (kind of like this). So my reviews are good. Seriously, I am bouncing my foot with excitement just thinking about this. If anyone in Berkeley, CA wants to learn programming they should contact me (dreamalgebra on google's email service).
Learning to be OK with feeling stupid is good anyway because if you shy away from it then you'll be less likely to venture in to intellectual domains you're unfamiliar with, and you'll hesitate more to realize you're wrong. Seriously, I think being comfortable with being wrong might be the core rationality skill. (See my post that touches on this for more.)
We've already talked a little about economics but it seems you haven't really got the hang of it yet. If you plan to sell your labour, the 'value' of your labour is not your problem, negotiate the best rate you can for what you can do. If you take a more entrepreneurial route you can try to sell a product. Again, your effort is not the point, you just negotiate for what the results are worth.
I'm starting to regret writing the post in the first person, 'cuz people think I'm actually looking for employment. I'm not, really. Anyway.
I'm not thinking about how much money I could make, I'm thinking about how competent I think I am. What you say makes sense if I cared about money. What I really care about is being able to have the identity of someone who codes competently, in which case the 'value' of my labor is what determines that. I want to be good at what I do, and I'm complaining about the huge gap between me-now and me-good, no matter how much money I'd make in either case.
But that's off-topic for this post, so I shouldn't have brought it up.
It's kind of arrogant to think that you are qualified to be the judge of your own value. If someone seems happy to pay you for your efforts, accept it in good grace and let them worry about what your time is worth.
Of course I'd look for external validation now and then, but that's not as important to me as building skill. Periodic tests via oDesk or the like should be enough to test my self-assessments for accuracy. But I don't care all that much about what the market thinks, really. I just want to build skills. I've managed to play guitar for 3 years without having the market judge its value, but I could care less. I play guitar for myself and sometimes my friends, and I do it because I care about its 'value': to me. I don't need to go busking to determine that.
Bow hunting skills?
I think it would be worth you while to learn some economics. Comparative Advantage would be a good place to start. Your values are valid but you should be fully aware of your choices.
I think you underestimate my knowledge of economics. I know about comparative advantage, marginal cost, diminishing marginal returns, Pareto frontiers, et cetera. I took AP Econ and folk at SIAI use the terminology quite a bit.
I totally have bow hunting skills! But not nunchaku skills... :/
I apologize, I tend to think that people who think their own academic accomplishments are significant factors in their future salary are probably confused about the way the world works.
I also expend significant effort on unmarketable skills (snowboarding in my case) but I don't expect anyone else to fund me for it. We live in a market economy; figure out your comparative advantage and negotiate the maximum price you can achieve for it.
Or, like, not. I totally realize that's what I would do if I wanted to make money, but I don't. At least for now, I only care about unmarketable skills. That's why I have so many of them. It was a mistake to write this post in the first person; I'm sorry for being misleading. But I'm not actually looking for employment. I have employment opportunities already, and things to do besides.
Want some brutally truthful tests designed to see how competent you are?
Take the SAT test, , which measures math ability, and verbal ability. Find a few psychology tests that try and measure memorization ability(like, how quickly and well you can memorize a topic)
Why? Because real world success, in intellectual endeavors, is largely a combination of how large your fluid intelligence is+memorization ability+ work ethic. The rest is due to combos of other factors.
Besides the SAT, you can take the LSAT, and study for a few things on there that require specific knowledge. The test is the single largest predictive factor of success in law school, and blind tests of competence.
There are a few other tests you can take. I recommend the AMC, which requires studying some topics outside of the regular school curriculum, but not too much.
Or, you could play starcraft for 3 months, and see how high you end up ranking.
Beyond these,I don't know of many good tests to see how competent you are.
Are you joking? Starcraft isn't even a well-designed game-- it has all kinds of crazy barriers to entry and elements that explicitly exist to make it unnecessary difficult for people to pick up. Besides, it's easy for even a bad gamer (see: me) to achieve a high-looking ranking (top 25 Diamond) in Starcraft II thanks to its nonintuitive rating and placement system, and true rankings are only maintained for the top 200 people in each region.
Yeah, I've done many of those. I took the SAT when I was 12. I've taken a few probably-inaccurate online IQ tests. I've done a few cognitive testing suites at SIAI. I'm in pretty good shape. In general though, there are better frameworks for cognitive testing. It's probable that one could make a neat suite out of PEBL, which is free and very customizable. Fluid g seems over-emphasized. The limiting factor for most rationalists tends to be strong metadispositions for thought, reflection, and drive.
They have those?
They're ad hoc, we've used one for a dual n-back study which ended up yielding insufficient data.
Any chance you could write up that study? I don't believe I have seen any SIAI-related DNB study; certainly it's not in my FAQ.
(Remember kids: only you can fight publication bias!)
We didn't study long enough to get any statistically significant data. Like, not even close. And I think sending off the data (even without names attached) would sorta breach an implicit privacy agreement among those who took part in the tests.
Shouldn't doing something successfully in the real world be in there somewhere?
and wealth.
Read "the bell curve"
basically, smart parents were more likely to go to a higher ranking school, and move themselves up in the social heirarchy.
Smart people tend to have smart kids. Dumb people tend to have dumb kids. Hence, the scores.
For the race aspect of this, you can find the stats where poor east asian kids do better than rich white kids.At least on the math portion.
Yeah, but that only matters from a self-assessment standpoint if the causal graph is wealth --> score <-- ability, whereas for an uncoached entrant it's almost purely wealth --> ability --> score.
Fair enough.
And coaching can't make up a large part of the score difference, either. There's more than 100 points discrepancy on Critical Reading or Math alone between the lowest and highest income groups, whereas coaching only creates improvements of 30 points in Reading and Math combined.
A major problem with applying this point of economics is that most employers haven't really got the hang of it yet either. It is a sad rationality fail to be focused on what you could have accomplished if your potential trading partners themselves were only more rational (unless you can actually make them more rational).
If you can find employers who understand this, more power to you.
I'm a competent web programmer, but I've always shied away from the idea of doing it professionally. There are reasons for this, but I can't tell if they're actually the reasons I don't want to do it or if I'm just afraid of failure/success/hard work and making excuses.
Reasons include: I don't want to design webpages as much as I like making them work, and it's hard to find small jobs that don't involve both; I'm not familiar with any of the common frameworks/libraries/CMS, just basic PHP (not even OOP very much), and jobs seem to tend to want multiple skillsets; other peoples' ideas are sometimes boring but I'd have to do it anyway if I were getting paid to; I'm worried that if it were a job it wouldn't be fun any more; sometimes it's not fun even when it's not a job.
There's also a sense that I'm just not good enough at it to work at the professional level, which is hard to convince people of, because by definition I can only show them projects I had the skills to finish.
I guess I'm posting this in the hopes that someone will talk me either into or out of taking it more seriously. Am I wasting a perfectly good marketable skill, or is my aversion valid?
Aaah! I knew your username was familiar but couldn't figure out how - I read it in the xkcd blag!
Haha. Yup, that's me. I've actually showed up around there a couple of times, but more often by name than by nick.
Do you know Randall Munroe well enough that you could convince him to hang out on LW? I want xkcd comics about timeless decision theory so much now that I have thought of the possibility.
We've actually talked about it before, but it would take more interest than I think he has for him to take up a new way of spending time on the internet right now. For a guy who draws stick figures for a living, he's surprisingly busy.
ETA: ... besides, lots of people could draw comics about TDT! In most places, the easy part would be finding someone who can draw and is funny, and the hard part would be finding someone who knows anything about TDT; on LW it's probably the other way around.