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Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
I think it's past time for another Stupid Questions thread, so here we go.
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Please respect people trying to fix any ignorance they might have, rather than mocking that ignorance.
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Comments (260)
Interviewers encourage interviewees to ask questions. And people holding presentations are asking for questions. Also people in general seem to like it if you ask questions about them. But not all of them. How do I choose good questions to ask in an interview, after a talk or with a person, especially when the interview answered all of my obvious question, as did the talk?
Definitely a good thing to look up beforehand. I might recommend the Manager Tools interviewing series. The key point is that even this point of the interview is NOT about you learning anything. The entire interview is you selling yourself. There's a view about that "you're interviewing them too," and you should hope you're competing against other candidates who think that.
Anyway, bit of a tangent as that wasn't specifically about just job interviews, but nonetheless the interviewing series addresses that insanely well. Probably want a link I think it's www.manager-tools.com.
The "you're interviewing them too" line is absolutely true if you are in a competitive market and are not desperate for a job. If you are unemployed, your best strategy is to get any job in your field, work there for a few months, then start hunting for another job. If you have a job and skills the market values (and thus expect to be able to get multiple job offers in the course of a few months), you can afford to be selective. This means you should not take a job offer unless it's an improvement from your last job, and it's enough of an improvement that you it's worth it to stop searching. There is a post somewhere on LessWrong about the decision theory on how long you should look on an open ended issue like this, I believe with marriage as the subject, but "don't take a job that sounds like it would grind your soul to dust" is a good starting point, as is "never take a pay cut, or a non-significant pay increase". Switching jobs is a pain, and you can't do it too often.
Getting back to the point, in an interview you should ask three main kinds of questions: questions that make you seem smart, questions that you show you were paying attentions, and questions that you actually want to know the answer to. If you can do two or all three at once, great. A good stock question is "Can you walk me through what a typical day in this position is like?", because it's rarely answered earlier and it's good to know. It's amazing how often people will talk about a job in generalities and not say, e.g., whether you are going to be sitting in a chair pressing buttons all day or whether you're going to be traveling, attending meetings, washing beakers, whatever. "How big a team will I be working with?" is another one, because again it sounds like you care about the particulars of the job, which you should if you're going to be working there for months or years. You should be able to get two or three relevant questions in your specialty too to trot out.
Finally, don't wait until the end of an interview to ask questions. It's best if you have a conversation, not a monologue. Don't interrupt, but if there's a break in the interview ask about something that you want to know about. You might find you have no questions left at the end - just tell the truth, that you already asked everything you wanted to know.
Source: I have a job. I also know quite a few people who are part of the process from the employer end.
I think it depends on your goals.
Have you already decided you want the job? "Based on this interview and the information I have given you, what do you see as my strengths compared to other candidates?" Same question for weaknesses but think about not highlighting them unless you are pretty sure you can defeat them by addressing them. One way to ask about them would be to ask something more leading, like "what are you unsure about, where you would like to hear more from me about the topic?"
Are you really just thinking about the job, where you already have adequate employment? Then ask about what matters to you in a job.
Listening to a talk for fun or learning? I think contextualized questions about application of ideas are good to bring the abstract down to the concrete and sometime reveal more. So, you might start a question with, "I am a ___ and in that work I see a lot of ___ . How do you think your idea of ___ applies to a ___ where ___ is usually the case?" I think the key there is not to focus on the introduction. Most people like to talk about themselves, so it is easy to fall into that trap and forget about asking a question.
This may be long for a stupid question... and it's not really one question... but it seems like a safe first post kind of place! It has just been on my mind a lot the last few months.
I was recently doing a review of my workplace's management system and used personal life examples to demonstrate why the management system is (/would of been) effective. Instead of convincing anyone else, I convinced myself my life would be better off if I had a personal management system.
I've googled high and low and found nothing that I could draw on. The amount of self-help and motivational books I waded through though... that was impressive. I find it particularly interesting that it doesn't seem present regardless of culture, even for procedure-heavy ones like Japan and Korea (at least in business) or more direct/rigid like Germany. Life just happens and you muddle through.
After putting pen to paper, I realised many "deficiencies" in my own life. I don't have a records "policy" - my files are on hard drives, NAS's, couple of clouds and a drive in a bank deposit box. I have no idea how many copies of my tax returns are floating around out there. I used to track expenses, but when I wanted to see my cashflow I realised I had no data for the last 2-3 years. I recently had to run out and buy some cleaning supplies because I ran out - that sums up my inventory system. That's a major barrier to cooking at home. I'm not sure what I have for emergency supplies either. I certainly don't plan (schedule or monitor) activities in my life at all. Risk management? I think my household insurance auto-renewed but not 100% sure.
Yet, I'd be considered decently organized among my peers. That seems terrifying.
Life isn't a project, or a company, but I think the "management system" approach would be beneficial because;
It engages system 2 thinking, resulting in (presumably) better plans
It allows optimization though sharing and iteration (assuming some common approaches develop)
It helps communicating and being held accountable, least for a certain set of relationships
It helps manage change, like the move from portable drives to cloud storage, or changing insurance coverage
It increases transactional memory, where you can put trust into a system to avoid having to keep a mental maps (of files, of money, of contingencies)
It allows outsourcing since the process is relatively well defined, such as to (virtual) assistants or maid services (I believe it'd be a net economic boom)
It can help be pro-active, like staying in touch at regular intervals - both prompting and prioritizing (more to do with how you approach life)
However, my prior is that almost no one does this. The most I've seen are individual components - some people run very good household budgets. It just doesn't exist as an overall framework.
Why? Is it because it doesn't work and/or isn't a suitable approach? A lack of definition to "life" to structure around/optimize towards? Is it more emotional, not giving up control and flexibility? Not taught/not socially acceptable? Does System 1 not bother with it, leading to failure?
--
I've spent some time working on this but it's tough and I'm really not sure the effort would be worthwhile. The trigger to take it seriously was a long chain of events that led to a life achievement list. It's still in brainstorming mode, but getting huge and it seems to me that I need to put a lot more effort into optimizing for it.
Just to be clear, a lot of the answers I have gotten in person have been along the lines of "pick what you want and focus on it". I think it misses what I'm trying to convey - how do you manage everything you don't focus on? Why do you do things a certain way? I want to know what to do with my copy of my taxes next time I file. I want to do it because I should and I want to know why I should. The system offers an imperative, built on the foundation of having thought it out and deciding "this is how it should be".
You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done. It was written before smartphones and cloud syncing calendars but it can easily be adapted to To-Do lists and managing your life in the modern age.
A basic summary is thus: Every action you need to do but haven't yet done is an open loop in your mind. You have to keep thinking about it until you do it, and close the loop. However, lots of things can't be done except at specific times and places. You can maintain seperate to-do lists for things that can be done anywhere (Call a friend to schedule a movie, tie your shoe, etc.), and things that need you to be at your desk, at work, or at a grocery store. Storing all the myriad things that you need to do in life in your head is stressful and difficult to successfully accomplish. If you offload this information to contextual to-do lists, you can forget about the open loop and rely on your general system to remind you if it only if you can actually do something about it. This allows you focus on things you're doing in the moment, without worrying that you're forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.
I am working through GTD myself and will post a more extended summary in language different from the book.
Much appreciated, I'll take a look!
I think this is a large part of it, but it seems like a subset of what I'm thinking about. This is a great answer if someone came up to you and asked "how do you get things done?", and it is a pretty broad planning approach. Even better, those who use a similar system can talk about their approach, ideally sharing ideas and "best practices". Even when I googled the book, I got thousands of hits that would help me - tools, blogs, reviews. To use corporate speak, this would be a set of policies, processes and guidance... complete with workflows. It fits perfectly (this comment pending me actually reading the book!).
what I struggle with is that there doesn't seem to be anything above this. Most companies have some sort of management system that would give context to the process.
To give a corporate example applied to real life, most people don't really evaluate risk in their own life. Here at LW and such we talk about existential risk, but I'd still guess that very few have disaster supplies or plans for much more likely events (this is from recent talks triggered by http://www.shakeout.org/ ). My wife and I talked casually over dinner about earthquakes and realised this is a non-trivial problem that probably should be taken seriously. Getting home, walking long distances, bridges, what to do if our apartment isn't structurally sound or flooded, where to meet/wait if communication is impossible, what to do in winter with no heat.
The same applies to a lot of other risks - robbery, fire, financial, accidents, sickness...
Each of those can be dealt with tasks that would be governed by the GTD process, so I think it's a big part (it is either done or not!), but I feel like there is this missing umbrella that binds these things together. There seems to be a lot of social gains to it as well. Talking about disasters with our friends would lead to some pressure on them to prepare, as well as share how we would do it and possibly find shared solutions.
Example above could be replaced with less extreme examples, like how you store your files/pictures/etc or do your household budget.
I have started working on something like that a while ago.
Interesting! Did you make any further progress? I personally see a great deal of value in this kind of risk identification. A lot of risks are not easily solved (eg: just buy insurance!) or properly quantified (eg: accident insurance protects me from income loss!).
No progress, I dropped the ball because of smooth sailing in my life. Which is exactly why I should prepare for things getting worse.
But seeing as people gave upvotes, there seems to be interest. I might pick the ball up again.
I have a similar vision to this but since my life ran smoothly for a couple of months, I did not put my thoughts onto paper.
Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.
The phrase "run your life / yourself / your family like a business" sometimes pops up but does not take the principle very far.
Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. Or be content with knowing that I spent any given sum at a grocery store, but then I wouldn't know on what products. When I buy some food on the go I needed to take note. When I get digital receipts the date on the receipt did not match the date the money disappeared from my account. And so on. The whole thing was not to be trusted and instead of helping me it bothered me, so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.
This seems very true to me and now seems like the largest factor. That combined with it being a horrendous amount of work, although I believe that may be because there is no foundation to draw on.
I can relate to this very well. I did write down every expense for almost 4 years but it was just too much work. It was never really useful either, which is surprising given everything I've read about budgets/etc. It may of helped get my wife and I on the same page, however, so I don't regret doing it.
I'd argue that this is the reason for having an overall umbrella. Why did we attempt to do this? Because we should? Because we wanted a specific answer? Does it require that kind of data? Most people who run a budget (including old me, before I got lazy!) did it because... we did. I liked the data. But it didn't feed into anything, didn't answer any important questions and didn't seem to influence my behavior.
On the other hand, if I needed to know if I can save enough in time to travel to Europe for 4 weeks... that's important to know! But it has nothing to do with a traditional budget (just cashflow), which I can do in ~15 minutes a month, if I organised myself to do it. (1)
Back to the overall umbrella/management system - the "why" should sit at the top. I do it because I need to plan for certain things, which cascades down to having a "budget" to a certain level of detail. Instead we seem to do it from the bottom up, resulting in making "perfect systems". The idea drives it rather than the actual need. There is no "good enough" in that approach. It's "cool", not effective. Maybe that's what I'm trying to define. A management system is meant to be effective, whereas we pick up a lot of good and cool ideas and try them out.
I actually have a story about that. The year was 2006 and I was heavily motivated to change my lifestyle. I'd just moved in with my then GF. We decided that we would track all our expenses (this was a good idea at this stage in the relationship, since we decided to merge finances more than normal), but further breakdown our grocery bills into nutritional groups. I have a nice table of how much I spent on meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, sweets... Talk about a lot of work. Interestingly enough, I got $29.55 in bottle returns. Anyway, I had the data but it did nothing. 50% of my food budget was still eating out. I still ate the same. Great idea, tremendous amount of work, accomplished very little.
(1) It'd be a four component thing - cash float, credit cards, direct withdrawals and paycheck.
Why should there be a general management system? To prevent fires.
Time and time again I meet people that operate constantly on the "kill any fire" mode instead of letting a couple of them burn down by themself and preventing any further fires from happening. This means instead of paying bills when they are so urgent that they are more important than looking for a better insurance right now people should set up a policy of paying bills in given intervals. Or setting up auto-pay.
What an exhausting way to live like that. I don't care about bills and where to put them. And there are a thousand more issues that I need to have cleared up in my life, like what to wear or where to get my food from, none of which I deeply care about or is my main focus in life. Or in any way my area of expertise. Which makes me wonder in how many ways I live life like that: Putting out fires instead of preventing them in the first place.
Since none of those areas - paying bills, doing taxes, getting food and so on - are my area of expertise or something I deeply care about I am very willing to compromise: Not getting the optimal result in exchange for something extremely easy to use that I do not have to think about. I have never seen something like that.
Look into quantified self stuff, for management tracking ability. some tracking I find useful: Pocketbook RescueTime Fitbit (other activity trackers exist) for sleep tracking, to help estimate time left in the 168 hour week. Keeping lists in an easy to check location. Each year I have a home folder for that year. any project started or worked on in that year has a folder for it. Keep nesting folders limited, sometimes nesting happens, clutter happens too, try not to clutter the home folder for that year. So far this works well for me.
I'll share my system in case it's helpful as a reference point.
Mint.com does a great job of tracking expenses, if you primarily use a credit card. (Which you should for the 1% discount on everything, unless you have bad self-control issues with money). It also lets you set budgets, which are fine for rough estimates but it's strength is in recording all your transactions and I just use Excel for planning out a yearly budget. For tax record keeping, all my pay stubs and tax-deductible donations go in a 'Fiscal Year 2014-2015' folder on my computer, which I keep backed up on google drive and on a hard drive every two weeks.
I've had great success with google calendar for managing my schedule, since it syncs with my phone and I get alerts 15min before an event happens. (For example, the biweekly backups are on here as an event, as are yearly 'time to set a budget' reminders, work schedules, gym visits, etc). A tip if you're overloaded with work and constantly busy is to block in some relaxation or 'hang out with friends' time so that those do not get pushed to the wayside.
For notes and to-do lists, I carry a small notebook and pen in my back pocket, which works well for me. (I use something similar to the getting things done method for the lists).
A lot of household supplies and food are totally fine to get as 'just in time' inventory, and they just go on the to-do list when I run out of the stored supplies (toilet paper, etc). The exception of course is a plunger, a fire extinguisher, and a first aid kit, which you should always have on hand. Every weekend I usually go on a grocery/supplies trip, do laundry, and clean the apartment.
For emergency preparedness, it's not something you have to constantly think about - you could take a day this weekend and figure out how much food and water you'd need for 3 weeks of power outage, go buy that, and forget about it. You might also want a 'go bag' in case you need to make a flight quickly.
I also feel like I'm fairly organized compared to my peers, but I don't actually know what their personal management systems look like. In general though, a lot of life is take-it-as-you-go, and I would not feel comfortable with a system that I can't afford to totally ignore if I need to.
Is continuing to write the story I started, that's turned into a novel, a good use of my time, or am I suffering a version of the sunk cost fallacy, and I would do better abandoning the story and starting something new (and presumably more properly rationalist), now that I've gotten my writing muscles properly exercised and in working order?
If you develop a reputation for not finishing your stories, men who value closure are going to be reluctant to read them. Consider that you have already abandoned Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me.
True. (Which is part of why I'm asking in Stupid Questions instead of Open Thread.)
As a possibly relevant detail, if I do end up unable to keep my motivation going, I have a backup plan to at least quickly finish up the current story, if not tie up as many of the dangling plot threads as I currently want to; specifically because of my experience with Myou've.
I think you should finish the story before you lose motivation. Writing without motivation would be really bad; I certainly don't recommend it. But developing a habit of not finishing things could also be dangerous in long term.
Perhaps you could treat "finishing the story" as a separate project. Imagine that someone else wrote the story, then the original author has died, and you have inhereted this task. You want to finish the story meaningfully, without reducing its quality, but you also don't want to prolong it any more than necessary.
:) In a nutshell, that's the trick I had in mind as an alternate source of motivation, if I can't keep my current motivation levels for writing the story up for a few more months.
Hm, now that you mention it, I think abandoning Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me was quite a good idea.
I'm curious; would you care to expand on your reasoning here?
To be blunt but vague, I thought it was bad, and I think your S.I. novel is fun to read and probably stretches your writing muscles more.
It's probably good to not trapped by the themes and plot arcs of the past if it turns out they're not so hot.
I don't think it's the sunk cost fallacy - if you're having fun, you should keep going. Your best work is still in your future.
Unsolicited silly advice: you're probably going to have to revise more in that future.
I have to say that I still am - I just managed to turn "Punch and Judy" of all things into a significant plot element. :)
I certainly hope so.
By 'revise', do you mean in the British sense of studying to get my background details straight, or the American sense of rewriting to improve previously existing text?
What's a good place online to ask questions about sex and sexual problems? LessWrong feels a little too public to me...
/r/sex is pretty good
::googles::
Yeah, it seems like that is the right kind of place. I think the standard links have answers to most of my questions anyway; my particular problem seems common enough.
xkcd forums.
we already know you are sick, feel free to ask!
I don't want to embarrass my girlfriend.
Hikikomori no more? If so (as seems likely what with the girlfriend and all), it gladdens me to hear it.
It's a little bit complicated; I'm a night owl and my girlfriend has insomnia, so we spend a lot of evenings at home together. My sleep schedule is seriously out of sync with the rest of the world right now. A typical day might consist of getting out of bed around 4 PM or so, lounging around a bit, taking my mom out to "dinner" some time around 9-10 PM, go home, visiting with my girlfriend at her place, going back home at around 2AM and start putting my mom to bed, finally finish putting my mom to bed around 4 AM, playing video games until 6 AM, and then falling asleep. (My mom has multiple sclerosis and is in a wheelchair; she needs a lot of help and doing anything with her takes a very long time.)
You can make another account or just ask as Username, but I'm not sure LW is.. um... err... competent to answer questions about sex X-D
/r/RedPill
Based on what I've heard of the "RedPill" belief system, I wouldn't guess that it would be the place to ask about things like these...
My google skills totally failed me and I know this should be easy but...
I read a story years ago about an emperor and shogun. The emperor was nice and the shogun was harsh, and when they switched places the people loved the shogun and respected him but hated the emperor. I'm telling it poorly.
Anyway I have been totally unable to find it again to cite or pass on. Anyone willing to lend me their Google mastery? Feel free to make fun of me for how easy it was for you ;)
I can't help you directly, but TVTropes' You Know That Show is really good at finding these kinds of things.
You can also try reddit's TipOfMyTongue subreddit
If one were to accept a dualistic interpretation of the hard problem of consciousness, to what extent would or would that not increase the probability of some aspects related to theism (e.g., that there may exist some completely non-material conscious being(s), that said being(s) may have power to interact with the world arbitrarily, that the non-material aspect of the mind might survive death, etc.)? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. Specific references appreciated.
Is breaking a Karma score of 1,000 still considered a threshold of becoming a 'real' member of LW?
I have ~200 Karma and feel like a 'real' (albeit quiet) member of LW, so... no? Also, this is the first time I've heard of the 1,000 threshold, and I've been at least lurking a bit more than a year.
I could be confabulating, but I have a memory of that threshold being involved in an survey from a few years ago.
A quick C-f through the surveys (or, at least, Yvain's censuses) would indicate the threshold was 100 in 2012.
I've got over 1000 and pretty much feel like an observer that periodically gets massively upvoted for injecting biology and astronomy information and analysis, which just happens to more than cancel out my negative karma from frequent jibes at local phenomena I find amusing or troubling.
Thanks for your contributions!
I remember that it used to be 100 Karma, although this was when the community was much smaller. Also, it was mostly used as a rule of thumb/heuristic for the personal accountability of one's posts (e.g. some people would withold a downvote the person posting it was new to the community).
I'm suddenly reminded of a tradition on Slashdot, where someone with, say, a six-digit userID mentions how the place is going downhill, only for someone with a five-digit userID to pipe up, then someone with a three-digit userID to post anything at all...
Ha, rereading my comment I see that it may sound pretentious, but this wasn't my intention. Reading your comment just triggered this random factoid stored in my mind :)
I have over 1000 and feel like a welcome guest, but not a real member. The score is from asking vaguely interesting questions, rehashing old LW arguments, a minimal amount of original thought and losing a couple of points from complaining about LW phenomena.
http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
C.S. Lewis: Secret Silver Slytherin?
Don't we have a list of "useful concepts" somewhere? This should go there.
Meh, I could not remember where I was in relation to this threshhold without scrolling up, and I don't open tabs to check people's karma while I'm reading and commenting.
I'm close to breaking a thousand*, which feels exciting, but I don't think of myself as becoming a particularly "real" member. Maybe when I start going to meetups.
*edit: not as close as I thought
I have a bit more than that, and I only self-identify as an LW regular, not any kind of a "real member". At a guess, you are not a real member until you stop looking at your karma, except maybe as a feedback on individual posts and comments.
I've had that thousand number stuck in my mind for some time now, so I suppose now that I've asked the question, I can actually stop looking at that total, and just try to micro-manage each individual post to maximize the karma it picks up.
... Or not, since I've got other things to spend my time on.
:)
I am not sure what does "a real member" mean. So far no one tried to collect any dues from me or issue me a membership card. Like shminux, I would probably call myself "a regular".
For what it's worth, I don't recall ever seeing karma=1000 as a threshold of any importance, either for myself or for others. I'm not sure the idea of a "real" member makes much sense either.
I suppose I make some distinction between usernames I recognize immediately and those I don't, which probably correlates pretty well with karma. And maybe between ones for which I have a reasonable idea of what sort of thing the user tends to post about, what kind of positions they take, how impressed (or not) I've been with their thinking, etc., and those for which I haven't. That probably correlates with karma too. Perhaps the first one is kinda sorta a bit like karma>=1000 and the second is kinda sorta a bit like karma>=5000 or thereabouts -- but those numbers are completely made up and the correlation isn't really good enough for them to make a lot of sense.
I run meetups in my city, which I guess probably makes me a 'real' member, and only have ~200 karma (in fact, I only broke that threshold by getting karma for taking the census).
No. You should either learn a bunch more math, or show the scars on your soul from demon-summoning. Or go to a bunch of in-person meetups and a CFAR workshop.
Depends on what you mean by 'Real' member. Karma is roughly correlated with comment/posting volume so I think 1000 is a decent threshold for "regularly says smart enough things" but plenty of people who are steeped in LW worldview almost never post to LW.
Index funds have been recommended on LW before. I have a hard time understanding how it would work investing in one, though. Do you actually own the separate stocks on the index of the index fund, or do you technically own something else? Where does the dividend money go?
(I'd be remiss if I didn't link this Mr. Money Mustache post on index funds that explains why they are a good idea)
To buy an index fund, you buy shares of a mutual fund. That mutual fund invests in every stock in the chosen index, balanced based on whatever criteria they choose. Each share of the mutual fund is worth a portion of the underlying investment. At no point do you own separate stocks - you own shares of the fund, instead.
Toy example: You have an index fund that invests in every stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The fund invests in $1,000,000 of stock split evenly among every stock on the NYSE, then issues a thousand shares of the fund itself. You buy one share. Your share is worth $1,000. You can sell your shares back to the fund and they will give you $1,000. Over the next year, some stocks go up and some stocks go down. The fund doesn't buy any more stock or sell any more shares. On average, the nominal value of the NYSE will go up by about 7%. The fund now owns $1,070,000 of stocks. Your one share is now worth $1,070.
The dividends go wherever you want them to. The one share of a thousand you bought above entitles you to 1/1000 of the dividends for the underlying stocks in the fund's entire investment. If you're smart, they go to buy more shares of the fund because compound interest will make you rich. You can have them disbursed to you as money you can exchange for good and services, though.
Investing in an index fund is very easy. You will pay by direct withdrawal from a bank account, so you will have to do something to confirm you own the account, but other than that it's like buying anything else online.
Index funds cover costs - which are low, because buying more stock and re-balancing existing stock can be done by a not-that-sophisticated computer program - by charging you a small percentage of your investment. This is reflected by your shares (and dividends) not being worth quite 100% of the fund's value. Index funds are good because they have a very low expense ratio. Many normal mutual funds charge upwards of 1% annually. A good index fund can charge about 0.20%-0.05%. That means you pay your fund about $20 for the privilege of making you about $700, every year.
Opinion time: I own shares in index funds. They are amazing. For a few hours work setting up an automatic transfer and filling out paperwork, I am slowly getting rich. I don't need the money any time this decade, so even if the market crashes tomorrow in a 2008-level event, overall the occasional 1990s-style rises cancel that out, leaving real growth at about 5% assuming you use any dividends to purchase more shares.
I will let you skip the next part of this process and recommend a specific fund: The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, VTSMX. It invests in every stock listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. If you have $10k invested in it, the expense ratio is a super-low 0.05, and American stocks are very broad and exposed to world conditions as a whole (this is good - you want to spread out your portfolio as much as possible to reduce risk). Go to vanguard.com , you can figure it out online.
I think I could talk about the minutiae of investing all day. It's fascinating. I should write that post about investing and the Singularity one day.
Thanks for the detailed response. The link was very good, too.
Another investing question: if I already have some stocks that were given to me as a gift, am I better off selling them and putting the funds in an index, or just holding them?
Additional info: I already have a well funded index fund and a retirement account, the stock value would be around 10% of their (combined) value. I've owned the stocks for 10+ years.
This is basically a tax issue. Selling the stocks would be a tax event so you need to calculate whether paying taxes now (instead of later) will be worth it.
As Lumifer said, if you sell stocks (and they're up) you pay taxes on the capital gains - the difference between the price of the stock when you bought it and the price now. If the price now is lower, you get a tax credit for the losses, up to a certain point. Capital gains taxes tend to be lower than regular taxes (in America, at least). Selling shares of an index fund works the same way, where you pay taxes only on the gains, so selling stock to buy what is essentially more stock is pretty much a wash - you don't pay more taxes overall, you just pay them now instead of later. I'm not sure whether being a gift affects the taxes, or what your basis is for capital gains. Investopedia might know, or ask an accountant.
Pretty much the choice of whether to sell the stock and buy more shares of the index fund is like any other choice in investment: which will make you more money? To simplify the math, imagine you sold all the shares now and paid taxes, so you had $X and could invest that in stocks or an index fund. Keep in mind the status quo bias - it is unlikely you would invest in this specific stock if you had $X to invest, and you should only keep the stock if that were the case (tax issues exempted - you'll have to do the math yourself).
The key is predicting what will happen to interest rates.
How would you estimate the probability that the post-Singularity world would consider pre-Singularity property to be too silly to be worth bothering with?
The most likely outcome is that pre-singularity property rights would indeed be meaningless post-singularity because (1) we are all dead, (2) wealth is distributed independent of pre-singularity rights, (3) scarcity has been abolished (meaning we have found a way of creating new free energy), or (4) the world is weird.
The Fermi paradox causes me to give higher weight to (1), (3) and (4).
There are two typical ways to invest in an index fund, plus one way that isn't.
Buy a mutual fund that mimics the index you want to buy. You technically own shares in the mutual fund, which is an undivided right to a tiny percent of the whole pool. To get your money out, you have to redeem your shares, which happens at the fair market value. (It used to be that redemptions happened at fair market value at market closing price; I don't know if that is still true.) To fund redemptions, the fund has to keep some cash on hand, so some small percent of your money isn't actually invested. If you invest in mutual funds in a taxable account, the churn in fund holders' redemptions create trades that cause capital gains, which creates taxable income for the fund as a whole. It will be a small percent, but it will still be there (on top of taxation of any dividends). This is because the legal model applied to your investment is like you are a partner in a partnership, where you get an allocation of profits and losses that are separate from your receipt of cash.
Buy an exchange traded fund that mimics the index you want to buy. These are still mutual funds in operation. The main difference here is that the shares in the fund are themselves tradable. Theoretically, I think this means that the fund does not have to redeem as much, so it can hold much less cash. It would do redemptions if people were bailing out of the market generally, so that sellers outnumber buyers. But the issuer can essentially make money by arbitraging any difference, which means effectively redemptions pay for themselves. Being exchange traded means that the mutual funds have to make some additional SEC filings, but these have become routine once EFT's became popular, and the costs are spread over a truly vast number of people. The other main difference is that you only pay taxes on capital gains when you sell your ETF shares. That is because the legal model treats an ETF like an investment in a corporation, where the corporation's profits and losses are not attributed to you, and you only get something when you get cash.
You can also buy all the shares yourself, which is something called a "synthetic" fund sometimes in rarefied circles. It eliminates all of the potential capital gains taxes until you sell the underlying assets, but it means that you have to buy a set of shares that would be really expensive and only comes in oddly sized chunks. For example, if you want to buy the stocks in the Dow Jones, that is 30 different stocks, any you would have to buy one of each. That might cost you $1,531.72. Who wants to buy investments at a price of $1,531.72 per unit? What do you do if you have $1,500 or $1,600?That is why ETF's are so attractive. They get all of the convenience of the mutual fund, the capital gains tax treatment of owning shares directly. Index funds, whether regular mutual funds or exchange traded funds, also have the benefit of spreading fixed costs over huge numbers of people, so the expenses are usually very low.
Exchange traded funds are actually a little more clever than that. From the fund's perspective, it doesn't redeem fund shares for cash. The ETF has a number of "authorized participants" which are banks that can create new shares of the ETF. To create new shares of the ETF, they purchase the underlying shares in large quantities (called a "creation unit") and provide them to the ETF, which then gives back the authorized participant the matching number of ETF shares. So for an S&P 500 ETF, the bank would first purchase all of the underlying shares of the S&P500 in the right quantity (generally a very large quantity) and provide them to the ETF, and the ETF would hand them X number of ETF shares that the bank can now sell. The banks make money through arbitrage, by buying and selling creation units when they are out of alignment with the price of the ETF.
A synthetic fund is slightly different from your description. A synthetic index is when you use derivatives to replicate the performance of an index fund. So rather than taking your $100 million charitable endowment and invest it in an index, you take your $100 million dollars and invest it in treasury securities, then enter into a swap contract that will replicate the perfomance of the index. Future payments go into your fund, and future shortfalls are removed from your fund. It can also be done with futures and the like.
Anyone know how much this is applicable to the UK?
Most of the information on index funds that has been provided in this thread, and in links from this thread, is applicable to the UK. I suspect all the information you're likely to retain, and need, is applicable.
Here is a quick-and-dirty document I threw together for London LWers looking to invest in index funds but not knowing where to start. There are better guides out there but they are necessarily longer. Googling "UK index tracker" will get you quite far.
It is very applicable to the UK. sixesandsevens document is a good start, but note that there is a whole world of online platforms now (Hargreaves Lansdown, Bestinvest, etc) which can be much more convenient and give you more control.
Note that there is SDRT of 0.5% on UK equities, which you will likely pay as a secret hidden tax on your index fund - the more ethical companies, such as Vanguard, make this clear - so you may wish to choose your index fund to avoid this pernicious tax. If you work in the UK, you are probably implicitly overexposed to the UK economy anyway, so this is an argument to track a global, non-UK stock index.
Hi everyone, I have a question related to the possibility that we live in an infinite universe, and the ethical implications that follow. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've looked over Nick Bostrom's paper on infinite ethics which, if I understand it correctly, suggests that in an infinite universe containing infinite positive value (good) and infinite negative value (evil), it appears to be the case that nothing we do can ever really matter ethically because all we can do is a finite amount of good or evil (which has no impact on an infinite value).
But I have seen discussions of multiverse ethics on Less Wrong where commenters are seemingly talking as if they are able to act in an ethically meaningful way in an infinite cosmos, talking about something referred to as their "measure", and of increasing their measure. I'm afraid I do not understand at all what they are talking about.
Can someone please explain in layman's terms what this sort of talk is all about (sometimes the discourse at Less Wrong is over my head, so as simply and clearly as possible please!). What is "your measure" and how can it be that it matters if the amount of positive value and negative value in the universe is infinite? Sorry if I am misunderstanding something basic and this question is stupid. Thanks!
My first thought is that that kind of argument is exactly the kind that even a highly rational person would be wise to respond to with epistemic learned helplessness. It involves putting infinities into a calculation about real-world decisions, and it's an argument that all ethical actions are meaningless.
Also, if one values amount of good accomplished instead of amount of good in the universe, the infinite universe doesn't change anything.
That said, I don't think the multiverse interpretation implies an infinite number of universes unless the universe is also infinite in space or time, so people discussing the multiverse may not believe in an infinite universe.
If the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many copies of me, following the same algorithm, so my decisions create infinite amounts of good or evil (through my copies which decide the same way).
Or, to see it from another angle, if the universe is literally infinite, then it is more or less infinitely repetitive. So let's take a part of universe containing a copy of approximately everything, and treat this part as a finite universe, which is just replicated infinitely many times.
Your "measure" is the proportion of your copies to the infinite universe.
Ok, I think that helps a bit. But if there are infinite copies, how can you talk of proportions? It's not like anything you do decreases or increases the number of copies, right?
Does this follow? The set of computable functions is infinite, but has no duplicate elements.
It sounds much like a defensive argument for evil behavior. Obviously Good and Evil are just abstractions which only humans can measure, and at the level of the universe these things don't exist and don't matter
Not sure if infinities really exist. Pretty sure it's important to not be a dick.
You don't have to be sure that infinities exist to explore the possibility. Have you looked at Nick Bostrom's paper? Do you think Bostrom was wasting his time?
Bostrom suggests the "domain rule" to discount unobservable infinities. Seems pretty reasonable.
In math, "measure" is a way of assigning a "volume" (or length, area, probability) to infinite sets. The "cardinality" of the set of numbers between 0 and 1 is the same infinity as that of the set of numbers between 0 and 2, but the standard "measure" of the latter set is twice as big. You can sum up certain types of functions defined on a continuum by "integrating" those functions values using the appropriate measure.
If there turns out to be a continuum of possible universes created by, say, a particle decay, then there's also a natural physical measure that corresponds to the probabilities we observe; the set of universes in which the particle decays before 1 half-life would be "twice as big" in some sense as the set of universes created in which the decay occurs between one half-life and two half-lifes. If someone offers to do something for you if-and-only-if a particle decays before one half life elapses, you should figure out the expected utility of a 50-50 bet, even if the reality might be that your decision is affecting two different infinities of subsequent universes.
There's a lot I'm glossing over and/or don't understand myself here (why is the probability measure the only ethical measure? lots of different-but-self-consistent measures can always be mathematically well-defined) but hopefully that at least explains the vocabulary a bit.
This is an extremely clear explanation of something I hadn't even realized I didn't understand. Thank you for writing it.
I am very afraid of bugs. I have to psyche myself up to get close enough to a bug to smash it. I have, on more than one occasion, decided to go to work without showering because there was a spider in the bathroom. Ants and flies don't bother me for whatever reason, but spiders/moths/beetles/grasshoppers/silverfish and almost anything else bug-like are very disconcerting to look at or be near.
This only rarely interferes with my life, but it is very frustrating. I'm not sure if I'm looking for a way to remove the irrational fear, or a coping strategy. "Keep gloves and lots of RAID around the house" is my current best idea.
There actually is a way! Exposure therapy works on phobias and apparently something like 90 percent of people have significantly reduced fear even 4 years after the therapy. There's even an app for it!
Exposure worked great for me. I used to be scared of all sizes of cockroaches. After living in an apartment which was absolutely filled with small German cockroaches for a couple of years, I have lost all fear of roaches that size and smaller, while still retaining fear of the larger American cockroaches. I predict that if I were to move into Joe's apartment, my fear of large roaches would likewise be cured in due time.
I have also slowly lost my fear of spiders (and other long-legged critters such as crane flies) by virtue of encountering and examining them from ever closer distances. My usual response to seeing a spider in the bathroom these days is to grab a generous amount of toilet paper and squash the disgusting thing, whereas a few years ago they would forced me to flee the scene. I like to think of it as having leveled up to the point where I can now defeat my house's random encounters.
Deliberate self-directed exposure therapy reduced my fear of certain types of bugs. It isn't pleasant, but I think you can be quite optimistic about the odds of success.
I keep wrapping paper around, both for wrapping presents and to give me a tool for killing bugs at a can't-jump-on-me-from-here distance.
I used to be creeped out by house centipedes, but I decided to get along with them after reading that they are generally harmless to humans and useful to have around because they kill all sorts of other household pests.
I think just remembering that they are a good thing and thinking of them as being on my team was helpful. I also gave cool names to the ones living in my basement (e.g. Zeus, Odin, Xerxes) and talked to them e.g. "Hi, centipedes. Keep up the good work, but please do try to stay away from me during the day, and remember our deal: you can live here, but my species has an ingrained fear of you guys, so if you drop down onto me from the ceiling or something I'm probably going to instinctively smash you."
A few premises
a) Some animals matter
b) Not all animals matter, some extremely simple animals don't matter.
c) There are anti-correlations of the form: the more cows there are, the fewer insects (or rodents) there are. - that hold true in our world in which one of the species is substantially more cognitively capable than the other.
d) There is currently no consensus on how simple a mind or cognitive system has to be for it to matter. Arguably this consensus cannot be reached, since different hypotheses will use different correlates to try and find the morally worthy thing.
Conclusion
e) We do not know now, and won't know in the medium future whether increasing or decreasing consumption of farm animals is desirable from an utilitarian perspective.
I don't know where this argument fails. I've shown it to many EA's and no one saw a big problem so far. However, some people think this is just stupid, and I'm happy to see it proven wrong.
To say the same in less abstract form: World 1 and World 2 have the same amount of land. In World 1, people eat cows and raise cows, so there are 100 cows and 1000 insects. In World 2 people are vegan and there is more forest land, World 2 has 10000 insects and no cows. Which world is ethically better seems to hinge on the comparative moral worth of insects and cows. Given we don't know what it's like to be a bat, or a cow, or a bumblebee, we cannot decide which world is ethically more desirable. Therefore we have no reason to direct our actions to make our world more like 1 or 2.
You can change insects (or rodents) and cows for any pair of animals that are anti-correlated in nature, and cognitively dissimilar, and where the size of the anti-correlation is larger than your certainty about which animal is more morally worthy.
Animals that matter may be better off not existing than living in suffering. Cows having greater moral worth might be exactly that which means you would rather not create and torment them, as opposed to insects.
On the other hand, see http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/ , which argues that insects have lives with negative value because of suffering. In that case, World 2 is strictly worse than world 1: fewer cows (who do have lives with value) and more insects (whose lives have negative value).
See also: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/07/vegan-advocacy-and-pessimism-about-wild.html
Why would people in the 27th Century want to revive other people who went into some kind of biostasis in the 24th Century? Wouldn't that make the 24th Century people selfish or narcissistic for wanting to take advantage of the more advanced health care of the 27th Century?
In general, Cryonics organizations have funds and people whose duty it is to revive frozen people. It's not like they're left in a random ditch to be found. Alcor (I don't know about the others) tries to only recruit people to this body who have relatives or loved ones in cryo, and are signed up themselves, therefore having an incentive both to unfreeze existing people and to cause the organization to unfreeze people in the future.
But even were they tossed into a ditch, there are several possible reasons:
1: Research. People from 300 years ago will have a wealth of interesting genetic, bacterial, possibly physiological, psychological, and other differences to study. They'll also have relatively privileged information about archaeological finds and historical manuscripts. I'm not sure how much that part will apply to the future, considering many more records are kept now than were 300 years ago, but the biological parts of the point hold regardless.
Profit: Reviving people from the past (at least the first time) would make whoever did it famous and respected, which will lead to more grants and other forms of remuneration. You could also put those weird primitives on a reality tv show.
Charity: People regularly pay to save stray dogs, cats, etc. from starving to death outside. They not only usually don't receive anything out of this, but in fact contribute to overpopulation of said animals as well as losing money. It would surprise me, assuming the process was not too costly, if there was no one in the next few centuries who felt it their calling to reanimate the frozen altruistically.
Experimentation. To perfect a revival procedure, you need to test it out on people. Depending on the availability of future corpsicles, there might be a limited supply, which would bump up people frozen centuries ago into the ranks of the potential scientific revivals.
Your second question is more a matter of morals but plenty of people do selfish things and yet we don't punish them with death for it.
I think you missed the point of my question. Why does wanting something at time index A, before that something has become technically feasible, make you a bad person, but not at time index B, when that something exists, works and has become socially accepted?
In other words, presumably people in the 24th Century could have the means for reviving cryonauts from the 21st Century, and they could have started to make progress on their own radical life extension as well. Would they go around calling each other narcissists for taking advantage of what they consider the current standard of health care? If not, would they say that about visionary people in biostasis from earlier centuries who expressed the wish to benefit from what the 24th Century people know how to do? Or if some of them survived to the 27th Century and had they friends and relatives in biostasis who wanted revival using the more advanced health care in the latter century, would they say something like, "We're morally okay with our life extension, but those people we knew a few centuries back in biostasis are selfish for wanting what we have. Screw them."
In other words, why does wanting something at the "wrong" time reflect badly on your character?
no
although an argument can be made that the wrong time is defined in terms of opportunity costs: Wanting something when that money could more easily and better be spent on other things. Some might say it's wrong to want a brand new car when you could buy a used car that works fine and spend the difference on mosquito nets. Wanting Cryo when it costs 200 grand is arguably more wrong than in the distant future when it costs 10k
I don't think it does. I'm confused. Am I missing some piece of context?
I'm used to seeing the assertion that cryonic revival almost definitely cannot happen unless a society has already Solved Biology, so the hypothetical "revival but no life extension" society feels contrived. Could the people of the future be hypocrites? Sure, I guess.
This sounds closer to a rhetorical question or a moan than to an actual question, and specifically moaning about negative perceptions of cryonicists is not a very high-value thing to do in a forum that's generally pro-cryonics.
Wait a second, who exactly is calling pro-cryo people bad names?
Sidetrack: If you're cryonicly revived, what are the odds of getting your gut bacteria back?
A lot of cryonics is head-only cryonics, so pretty low.
Good point, but what about whole-body cryonics?
I think very high if they're trying to preserve them, otherwise very low. We know bacteria can survive freezing fairly well in many cases, but if they're not trying to preserve them I imagine the revival process could be deadly to gut flora.
I'd imagine that if you can be revived, the reasons you want your gut bacteria back would no longer apply.
What's your line of thought?
My guess is that if you're being revived as something much like your current self, you will at least need simulations of gut bacteria.
How do you actually get a first job? I haven't completed my degree, am struggling to live on my government provided student allowance, and don't have any experience to put on my CV.
You never sacked groceries in a supermarket during your teen years, as I did?
I can see why you might want to avoid having to do that in today's economy, however, where you have to invest your time in the most efficient work experiences you can get to position yourself for higher wages quickly.
I have been accepted to App Academy and have been considering it as a faster option to getting high-paying work, but as a younger, international candidate I'd have to pay for flights as well as a US$5000 deposit. It's something I'd even be willing to borrow money for, given my waning motivation for university, but without an income or much current earning potential I don't know if I could get a loan for it. And I couldn't earn enough to go to the round I've been accepted to in time.
Anecdotally someone close to me did one of those and it was a quick way to burn thousands of dollars.
I tried to dissuade them, but end the end they came back with less knowledge than I did of the subject, and all I did was follow some youtube tutorials and look at stack overflow to create a couple learning apps for android.
The general incentives for this one seem better than average, (they generally take a cut of your first year's income rather than an upfront fee, high average income aster etc.) but I get a different, fixed payment contract since I'm from NZ. It's tempting, but higher risk than if I were from the US, especially since without a completed bachelors it'd be much harder to get a visa, and work here or in Australia won't pay nearly as well.
I'm really losing motivation at university and have my own mental health issues, so the prospect of something like that has been somewhat comforting as an escape route.
This has turned into "somnicule's personal problems" rather than the actual point of the thread, so I'll leave it there.
Anecdotally two people close to me did similar crash camps on coding and ended up with high-paying coding jobs despite having no experience in software development and degrees in unrelated fields. They seemed to do well, but since this isn't a controlled experiment I can't say whether the jobs they got are jobs they'd have not been able to get if they just studied on their own for a while.
That assumes the goal of App Academy is building knowledge. I don't think it is. The goal is getting a well paying job. Somnicule is likely smart and has knowledge of programming but he still doesn't know how to get a job despite not having formal credentials.
Paying thousands of dollar for going to a state without a job to a state with a 50000k job is okay.
Were you involved in any activities in high school? (Sports, clubs, volunteering, etc.) Are there any interesting projects you've completed on your own? (E.g. do you have a blog?) Do you have any hobbies? Personal qualities to highlight? How do you spend your time?
Rowing for one season, competed in a mathematical modeling competition and didn't win but got a special mention from the judges, traveled to Ecuador for a month as a volunteer project, did some maths and physics tutoring.
Personal projects are pretty limited, but I've got a Django play money prediction market site that I could get running again in a weekend.
Beyond that, there's nothing that leaps to mind.
Those all sound pretty good to me. You might even come across as overqualified for menial work. If you want to reach a little bit, have you thought about trying to get freelance software development work? Getting paid to improve skills is always nice right? If you can't find anyone in real life ODesk.com is an option... if you build up a reputation on that site, you'll be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world. A degreeless friend of mine was making over $50 an hour after over-delivering for ODesk clients for 6-12 months.
I'm not sure if it's the same where you live, but I found using the phone much more effective than sending applications all over the place. I first sent the application, then called. A good personal first impression, if you manage to squeeze it in, seems to beat a well written application any time.
I probably need to do some exposure therapy with phone calls, but it's definitely worthwhile doing that.
Few of the people were absolute dicks when I called them and told me just send the application, but then I figured I probably didn't want to work for them anyway. So don't give up if that happens.
Maybe too obvious but: Ask around. Ask your friends, family, acquaintances... Your personal network is a key factor to finding a job (especially if you're not picky about what job you want).
As for rounding out your CV, create a category called: skills. Skills your probably have: Fluent in MS Office, research (you're at university right now, no?), out-of-the-box thinking (you're on LW, after all, you'll be better than average at this), works well in team (if you did any sort of team sport or online game)...
If you can't come up with anything for the "skills" category, ask your friends and family. They should be able to help you out.
Thanks, this is helpful. I've been hesitant about contacting family and friends for this, but on reflection there's no real reason for that.
Informational interviews let you get an insider perspective and some connections and pointers. I've known people who got offers this way. People love giving advice. Also consider volunteering in your area of expertise to both gain experience and build your networks.
Your school might have useful resources. If there is a career center, go there and see what kind of resources and help are available. There could be a student internship program, student job boards, career fairs, etc. Professors sometimes have work opportunities as well (they might announce these, or you may have to ask).
You said you did some programming. Having your Django play money prediction market on github for people to see that you can program is likely valuable.
You can go to meetup.com and search for for local meetups where programmers go. Then you go there and tell everyone that you speak with that you are searching for a job as a programmer.
What are the arguments for/against owning a house in a given city, vs eg renting, travelling between multiple cities/couch surfing, and other possible ways of living?
Depends wildly on your career and preferences. This is too big a stupid question to give one stupid answer to.
Khan Academy has a pretty good introductory rent vs own video. As has been mentioned above, the answer depends heavily on your career and preferences, as well as a bunch of values specific to your circumstance (Khan notes he rigged the numbers so renting came out ahead economically, but he could've just as easily come to the opposite conclusion by changing some values. I count something like 7 free variables (rent, house cost, down payment, loan interest, property tax, upkeep, investing returns), not counting the intangibles.)
An argument relevant to men interested in women: to my knowledge, women find men who own homes more attractive than men who rent (who, I'm guessing, are more attractive than couch surfers. According to Mark Manson's model (which is on empirically sketchier grounds, although he's the only guy whose dating advice I've seen unanimously recommended in the LWsphere), being a couch surfer will do little to impair a man's ability to have one-night stands, but will greatly impair his ability for anything longer-term.)
The New York Times has a pretty good rent-buy calculator with 21 variables.
To further clarify: I mostly meant non-monetary arguments. EG: If you own a house you will have to do upkeep on it vs if you rent an apartment the landlord will be in charge of it. Quality of Life things.
Pro: long-term stability for oneself or the family, if you have one, more control over your living space, real estate is potentially a good (and a more disciplined) investment, mortgage interest tax deduction (in the US).
Con: flip-sides: tied to a specific area, illiquidity of your capital, being forced to sell or rent out, possibly at a loss, if you cannot afford to pay the mortgage or have to move for other reasons.
The standard rule of thumb "buy a place when preparing to start a family" probably still works 80% of the time.
I'm a year from completing a PhD in genomic science. I am now completely disillusioned with my field, and indeed professional life in general. I entered with ambition, and have been cleansed of it. I didn't quit early on because I lost all my self esteem and assumed the problem lay with me, and that I would be equally unhappy elsewhere. I'm now almost sure this is wrong, but I only have about a year to go, and no idea what to do next, and am fairly well paid, so quitting seems imprudent.
I have basic statistical and coding skills (whose usefullness in the real world I cannot assess) and honestly no idea what i want to do with my life. I cannot imagine enjoying a job anymore, but intellectually, I'm aware this is probably just a result of my present, rather toxic environment. I would like something socially valuable and/or lucrative, but will settle for something which has normal work hours and doesn't drain all the life out of me. My definition of socially valuable aligns well with that of the LW community, though I place much lower credence on a near term Singularity than most here, I think.
I imagine this is a common ish situation, and advice to me would be generally relevant.
1) Tell me if this is the wrong place for this kind of moaning 2) Advice? Sources thereof? Finding a job? Overcoming apathy? 3) How to assess the usefullness of ones skills? Low hanging ways of improving them?
Ask your professors and school career services and fellow students what are some good non-academia career options. Most people who get a PhD in your field aren't going into academia, so where are they going?
Research Labs and Pharma/other medical companies (which I imagine are your major prospective employers), or some bio-oriented software companies will have wildly varying work environments. Do your best to choose one that seems to have a friendly, lower-pressure environment. Cultivate your life outside of work, and make friends inside. Save some money.
There's good odds that the professional world will treat you better and demand less than your PhD program.
Then figure out where you want to go from there.
Coding + stats skills + some biology = the world is your oyster (pharma, research labs/institutes, postdocing if you aren't sick of academia yet, bio startups if you feel you can get invested in something again, etc). I am sorry you had a toxic experience in graduate school. I know this does not help, but I can tell you these are very common, especially in your field.
Just wanted to say good job for realizing the problem was probably with this job, not with you. You may find it helpful, motivationally, to talk to friends/acquaintances and ask them what they like best about their job, so that "a job that doesn't make you miserable" feels more achievable and you feel more hopeful/driven about pursuing it.
I say this b/c a friend of mine was miserable at his job, and I realized how miserable when I told one funny story about my workplace, and he wondered if he could work there, specifically, because I didn't seem unhappy. It was clear he didn't alieve that you could be less unhappy than he was (throwing up every day) at most jobs. In that state of mind, it's hard to get excited about applying!
Also, try to do nice things for yourself, generally. Being as unhappy as you sound in your job is kind of like having walking pneumonia -- it's a big energy drain on everything else you're doing. You may find it helpful to ask "What would I do to be kind to a friend who had walking pneumonia?" and then do those things for yourself. You'll wind up in a new job eventually, but, in the interim, you may want to make sure you treat the symptoms, as well as the root problem.
From what I've seen people who have been wasting away in academia and described their position much like yours have become WAY happier when transitioning to the private sector.
As a fellow biology PhD student with a somewhat different experience (with you on the work hours, but I'm really glad I'm here), I hope you don't mind me asking what has been so draining about the experience?
There are a lot of things wrong, I don't know which of them is the most important...
1)I have zero control over my own work. I am working frantically all the time to complete analyses requested by other people, most of which turn out to be useless or ill thought out. People generally don't understand programming and stats enough to know how long things should take.
2)My boss is widely regarded as a bit of a tyrant. I have a powerful aversion to interacting with her in any way, and she has extremely poor communication skills. Our relationship is terrible. I think this is my fault as well, I work a lot but seem to get little done, and whenever I'm around her I feel a crushing sense of guilt and insecurity (this is all pretty melodramatic and childish - any my issue more than hers, but there it is).
3)The culture in my lab is about producing papers, not discovering things. I have the impression that almost none really give a crap about what we're studying.
4)I'm in a small town in a foreign country which I hate.
5)I have no belief in the value of the work we do. Nor do many of the smart people I've talked to. Many of these smart people have quit the lab recently. I was attracted to the lab by work that I didn't have skills to fully understand at the time. Knowing what i know now, I'd never have come. Our results take the form of vague correlations, and have no practical relevance to anyone.
6) Because I transferred into statistics from wet work a year into my PhD, my boss has been reluctant to give me any real responsibility. she's given me these vague, ill thought out side projects (other people's opinions, not my own), which has yielded dead end after dead end.
7) I generally have the impression that I am bad at my job. I have extreme difficultly focusing on my work and I make a lot of embarrassing bugs and errors. Part of this may be due to diagnosed attention difficulties, but I think most of it is just a total lack of interest. Forcing yourself to do something well when you don't care about it is difficult.
I think overall it's not so much the negative stuff as it is the total lack of positive reinforcement. Aside from a few brief false alarms, I have literally never had any success. I know there must be parts of the job that other people find rewarding, but i simply haven't experienced them.
Get in touch with them. They'll understand your frustration, and might sympathize enough to give you better help than we can.
If you need a plan to improve your situation you might consider Athol Kay for advice. He is not uncontroversial (see this thread), but he provides you with a clear tested plan to deal with your situation (the book is not only about person-relationships but also written if you are attached to a job).
I don't know what the academic job market is like in genomic science, but if you would take pleasure in teaching you might enjoy working at a liberal arts college, which would likely be a very different environment then being in a PhD program.
Teaching is something I would love to do, but I was given to understand that you basically have to do research nowadays, due to the glut of academics.
It depends on the field and the school. If you don't care about status, you will have a much easier time finding an academic job where teaching undergrads is considered an important part of your job.
A response from someone, who is happy in research of biosciences:
The personality of your boss is very important. I always payed a lot of attention to my emotional responses to potential bosses during interviews. Privately asking for the opinions of their subordinates can also help. As you write below, your boss "is widely regarded as a bit of a tyrant". There must be a way to find out in advance next time. For me, the meaningful topic is not enough to save the job, if the boss is a toxic person. On the other hand, the less sexy topic can become meaningful, if the boss lets you follow your curiosity and your ideas (within the constraints of the budget). The working hours are also boss-dependent.
However, I must make one point - I am not saving the world or hitting for the Nobel price. My goal is to play and be somewhat useful to society while doing that. None of my papers is a dramatic thing, it rather feels like a tiny drop into the ocean of knowledge. Some people at lesswrong say: if you do not perceive your topic as the most important issue of the world, change the topic. This is the test I would not pass. I just hope to be a little helpful.
[Meta]
While writing my recent post, I was thinking that it would be great if there was a summary of all the best answers received from widely shared 'stupid questions' in Stupid Questions Threads. I'd call this post 'The Best Answers to Stupid Questions', or 'Frequently Asked Stupid Questions, and Answers', and it would be analogous to how NancyLeibovitz summarized conclusions on procedural knowledge gaps. I might include responses from this thread in such a post. I have some questions about how I/we might gauge the best (answers to) stupid questions, aside from upvotes, among others. Would I only include questions/answers that seemed most generalizable?
Also, if I wrote this, how much should I care about privacy? I notice I don't actually have a common sense in this regard, so I'm asking honestly.
If someone has already posed a question in a Stupid Questions thread using their account, is it fair to assume that it's fine to share it more widely by profiling it specifically in a post? Is this a non-issue?
If it's not fair to assume so, how should I go about seeking consent to include the Q/A in the post? What's reasonable?
I'd call it "Smart Answers to Stupid Questions Repository".
To your privacy concern, I'd say it's a non-issue. If you post in a thread like this, the assumption is that you're putting your post out in the open for The Entire World to read, link to, quote, rebut, etcetera (largely because this is, in fact, the case.)
The phrase "Non-Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" seems to be nearly unique despite being a straightforward perturbation of a pop culture reference.
Privacy can sometimes be a tricky issue. I don't think this is here a problem as long as you stay within LW.
As far as copyright goes content on LW get's licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Is it less annoying if, instead of asking to borrow your brains, I propose to play DM in a tabletop campaign where you're playing a character who looks suspiciously like me? Is it better if there are actual Akratic Goblins instead of just keeping things 99% realistic? (Couching it in Dungeon Punk metaphors might kinda break the point, which is to trick my brain into doing a better job at communicating the problem(s), and to trick at least one stronger brain into taking the challenge so's I can borrow the winning strategy. But if there's a necessary engagement tradeoff to overcome my general lameness, then I should try to make it?)
You might get more answers to this question if it was more easily understandable. I can tell that you're trying to communicate through metaphor, but it's so opaque that it's more like a riddle than a question. Do you think you could restate your question in more direct language (or with another metaphor to give us something to triangulate with, if you're more comfortable with that)?
I'm not sure if I understand the question, either. But, if there's someone whose brain you've already asked to borrow before, asking them whether it's annoying is probably a thing you should do (assuming you're similar to me).
I tend to feel like I'm asking for free stuff and offering nothing in return when I ask for advice, especially from people who I don't know well (or don't know at all - like forums I've just joined). But, most people who I ask for advice don't act like I'm wasting their time, and the times I've asked whether they mind, they usually say they don't mind or they like being helpful for the sake of it. And when other people ask me for advice, I tend to enjoy the conversation if it's a topic I have any knowledge/experience in, and sometimes it's sort of flattering to be asked. So, it looks to me like mentoring people is something that most humans enjoy doing, but some humans don't ask for it as often as we should because we mistakenly think it's a burdensome request.
(Also, as a data point, straightforward brain borrowing feels like a better offer than RPG playing. Probably because lending brains feels like building social capital and doing something useful, but RPG format registers as self-indulgent thing that I don't have time for, and unlikely to be as fun as just talking about it would be.)
Having at least a friendly acquaintanceship with the person to begin with does make it easier to ask, though. Getting to know intimidating people who seem like they're a level above yours, and possibly actually are, is a difficult thing that I don't know much about myself. Though it's probably more about dealing with one's own nervousness and awkwardness than anything - the higher level person will probably see it as ordinary making friends. And some people don't mind strangers asking them for help, so even if you don't know the person you want to talk to, it could still be worth asking. Or you can ask in a group context, like a forum, and see who shows up.
Speaking of which, I'm gonna make myself ask the bootstrap startup forum for help by the end of the day today, because your post reminded me that I really need the advice and really shouldn't be so scared of offending them by being too new and unknowable to reciprocate right away.
How do you approach a huge pedantic writing project like a thesis or a review paper? Despite reading some self help on the on the subject, I feel completely stuck, overwhelmed and don't know where to begin each day. If I manage to do some part of the project I do it way too thoroughly and waste time. I don't seem to have terrible problems with akrasia with other kinds of projects, it's just that I've never done anything this big that requires intense self monitoring from the beginning to the end.
Examples of how you approach different kinds of big projects like programming an application are welcome too.
I do this sort of thing by starting as broadly as possible. Assuming you already have the majority of the information you need (ie, the research phase is more or less over), you should be able to sit for 15 minutes or so and make an albeit disorganised list of broad themes that you want to include in the paper. Concentrate during this phase on making the list, not evaluating what you put on it (some things will turn out to be irrelevant, some will be duplicates or link closely with each other or spark new interesting ideas - but make an effort to ignore all this at this point).
Once you've got your list, you can spend some time ordering it (so that closely linked items follow each other), discarding items that turn out not to fit in, and so on. Try and stay broad at this point (though you can jot down elsewhere more detailed points that you might want to make, if they occur to you; and it's fine to add new items that get sparked). This process should help you figure out what your "narrative arc" might be, what conclusion you're working towards, and so on. If something seems important but confusing, it might mean you need to do more research for that section.
Now you've got an outline that essentially consists of chapter or section headings, and some ideas for what's going in your introduction and conclusion. Depending on the length of the paper, you might want to do another outlining step in greater detail (listing your points in each section, but still not actually filling out the writing), or you could start writing now. I tend to work on writing the sections that seem easiest first, and then join up the more difficult bits afterwards.
Inevitably, it turns out during this phase that some of the links are weak or disjointed, some of the arguments I originally intended to make are poor, and the conclusion I thought I was heading for is actually not quite where I end up going. So lots of adjustments to the outline take place and the whole thing needs a good rejig at the end. But editing is straightforward enough when you have an already extant text to work on!
That's the sort of process that works (usually, well enough) for me: I'm sure others do it completely differently. Maybe you can pick out some stuff that seems useful in there, though.
On the akrasia level, I find that the harder the task seems, the more frequent "reward" hits I need for working on it. For me, these hits mainly consist of getting to cross an item off my to-do list. So if I'm really struggling with a paragraph, my to-do list can contain such fine-grained items as "Think about the structure of [paragraph x]", and "Write a sentence explaining how RelevantAuthor (2012) is relevant here". Even a poor effort at doing these things gets the item crossed off (though if it still needs re-doing or more work, it will of course get put on again).
I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.
For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under "Confession" that said "Tam Lin" probably wouldn't be much help to anyone else!).
So, when I worked on the book, I wasn't working on the whole book. I just needed to turn "Confession -> Tam Lin" from notation into text.
I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like "Human Flesh Search" "Gov't Using Collective Score-Settling" etc, and then worked on individual sections.
I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.
I think the other benefit of the "break it down" approach is that you don't wind up with a blank document thinking "What will I do?" You sit down saying "Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin." Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.
A question that has been asked before, and so may be stupid: What concrete examples are there of gains from CfAR training (or self-study based on LessWrong)? These would have to come in the form of very specific examples, preferably quantitative.
E.g. "I was $100,000 in debt and unemployed for 2 years, and now I have employment earning twice what I ever have before and am out of debt."
"I never had a relationship that lasted more than 2 months, but now am happily married."
"My grade point average went up from 2.2 to 3.8"
"After struggling to diet and exercise for years, I finally got on track and am now in the best shape of my life."
etc.
I went from being single to being in a relationship that's still going 2ish years later but who knows if going to a CFAR thing was at all responsible.
Could a psychological payoff be specific enough as well? Would e.g. "an embellished sense of intellectual superiority" be too vague for the purpose of your question?
That's the Dunning-Kruger thing, isn't it? :-P
If you want marketing materials or want to estimate the upper bound, the question is useful. If you think you'll get some sort of a representative sample, um, sorry to disappoint you...
I think the question is a useful one even if it fails to elicit useful answers.
A story about how someone got a result usually contains more than just the result. It suggest what kind of techniques the person learned and makes responsible for the success. It can also tell you about the background of the person.
Case studies are useful to start thinking about a subject.
Quite right. There are always people who undergo spontaneous improvement, and if we cherry-pick success stories, we might just come up with those examples. I'd rather have a proper statistical study, and I think that CfAR is working on that. But until then, I'll make do with success stories.
I've installed various mental habits from my time on Less Wrong. My habit of trying to notice rationalization as it happens, in combination with the "Tsuyoku Naritai" attitude, led me to become much more serious about physical fitness. In the last fourteen months, I've gone from moderately overweight and sedentary to lean, fit, and strong, with a minimum of the motivation issues that had previously prevented me.
I've never attended CFAR and am not especially deeply involved with LW, so this may not really be the kind of example you're looking for.
OK, that's a pretty specific benefit. Thanks.
Most benefits (that I can recognize) aren't particularly concrete. Some things (like the length of my relationship) could be in part of internalizing LW concepts but I have no way to measure it.
The biggest concrete impact is that I've grown more social. Not just within the aspiring rationalist community (also that's also a big part of it) but by slowly expanding my comfort zone and having a bigger understanding on what I find important in different kinds of social encounters.
Not a very satisfactory answer, I assume. I think that's because of two reasons:
My life wasn't in a good spot the last year (or even two years) due to things that were more or less out of my direct control. Not the best circumstances to execute big life-changing plans.
A lot of the benefits I've gotten from hanging out on LW are relatively small. They do add up to larger increases in my wellbeing, but nothing particularly concrete.
Maybe I've got a better answer in a year.
Within 3 months of attending a CFAR workshop I had left my job for one that I preferred and that paid 15% more. Within 6 months I had started exercising daily (previously once every few weeks), waking up consistently at 6am (previously varied anywhere from 8-10am), and eating significantly healthier (I also started eating vegetarian meals 2-3 times a week, previously 0). Independent of any of these concrete behaviors, I now have a very strong belief that I can intentionally construct/change my life and behavior in ways that will actually work.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc. I have a fairly strong belief that attending a CFAR workshop and interacting with the alumni community has been at least partially causal in me improving my life, but I don't think any of what I've said constitutes good evidence of that claim.
The first time I read the sequences, they were earth-shattering revelations that upset my entire life. The second time I read them, I could only make it few a few posts, because everything they said was obvious. So one gain for me is that existential/religious questions no longer bother me. I got answers that satisfied me, and I've moved on with my life. I suppose you could argue that I could have found the same answers somewhere else, but honestly, I doubt it.
Another big change is how I argue with people. One of my favorite Less Wrong ideas is the Taboo a word sequence. I use this all time. Whenever I encounter some vague statement like "Freewill is nonsense" or "We should live in a more just society" or something like that, I taboo the word and try something else. I approach words differently. I don't know if this has improved my life, but I no longer feel as though I am incapable of expressing myself and my position.
I think I may be more rational. I know, without a doubt, that participating in LessWrong has caused me to self-identify as a rationalist, more than I would have if I had not come here. I feel that this self-identity is enriching and has made me a better person.
I try and do something I have never done before every other week. This habit was inspired and reinforced by Less Wrong. This has made me less afraid to do new things.
I often catch myself rationalizing. This didn't used to happen, I think.
I want to point out that this question doesn't quite test for the right thing. One way an organization like CFAR can cause extreme life improvements is by encouraging participants to do extreme things generally in order to increase the variance of alumni outcomes after the workshops. That leads to potentially many extreme improvements but also potentially many extreme... disimprovements? And the latter are harder to notice because of survivorship bias. (There's also regression to the mean to watch out for: you expect the population of CFAR workshop attendees to be somewhat selected for having life problems and those could just randomly improve afterwards.)
I expect the main benefit of CFAR training should be that it improves median outcomes; that is, that it improves alumni ability to consistently win. But this is hard to test for by asking for anecdotes: it would be better to do statistics.
You're absolutely right. CfAR could get statistics by measuring quantifiable goals across its students: Grade point average, wealth, weight-loss; preferably with a control group. Until then, I'm just looking for any info I can get.
Is the following (conspiracy?) theory implausible? Could it be that Google and the other big players are well aware of the dangers of AI and are actively working to thwart the dangers internally? They could present an image of no concern so as to not spark any government intervention into their affairs or public concern getting in the way of their business plans. But should we not believe that they have considered very thoroughly whether there is immanent danger from AI, and are running their business in accordance to the resulting utility function?
Isn't viewing the present situation with the big AI players as a tragedy of the commons scenario too simplistic? Even from say Google's selfish perspective, should it not be working to stave off an AI apocalypse?
I believe Google has an AI ethics board due to MIRI/FHI/&c. influence. If you are correct about their long game, then MIRI&c almost certainly knows of it, and perhaps you could test out the hypothesis by looking for shadows in those organizations' strategy reports or something if you're truly interested. May or may not be a great idea to shout the results from the rooftops, however.
The most straightforward explanation of Google's behavior is:
You can't assume that the danger from AI is so definitely true that anyone competent who considers it will come out agreeing that there is danger.
Who has given the issue serious consideration? The only example I can think of of someone giving it serious consideration and concluding we don't need to worry is Robin Hanson, but I really have no idea how to identify, or even estimate the number of people who seriously considered the issue, decided there was nothing to worry about and then went about their lives without mentioning it. Any thoughts on how to approach the question?
It would be special pleading to bring up "Google has seriously considered it" when that is part of "Google has seriously considered it and is hiding it", yet to not bring that up when it is part of "Google has seriously considered it and has decided it's nothing to worry about".
It is of course possible that Google has not considered it at all, but that would apply to Rasputin496's original suggestion as much as it applies to mine, so mine still would be a more straightforward explanaion than his, even if it's not the most straightforward explanation on an absolute level.
(If you think I shouldn't have used the word "most", but should have said something like "most out of all other explanations that make the same assumptions", then sure, I'll accept that.)
When Google acquired DeepMind part of the deal was that Google get's an ethics boards. The impression I got, was that the purpose of that board is that DeepMind doesn't evolve into a UFAI.
Jaan Tallinn who made his fortune in Skype is one of the big donors for MIRI and was also a huge investor in DeepMind. I would imagine that he and a few other people who are less public are responsible for demanding the board.
I think every MIRI workshop did include someone from Google.
Luke did write somewhere that MIRI got six-figures in it's lifetime from Google matching funds for employee donations.
On the other hand Google is a big corporation. "well aware" is not precise term when thinking about giant companies.
How do I stop being a hipster? I saw Bryan Caplan advising his readers to read Scott Alexander and my first reaction was "Oh no, a well-known blog is recommending people read my favorite little blog. Now more people will read it and I won't be as special." I know this feeling is irrational, but how can I overcome it?
Whether this feeling is irrational depends on what causes it. It makes sense to worry about a community you like becoming popular, since it means that an increasing number of people would join it, potentially reducing its quality.
I don't think that's what caused my angst, I think I was worried about becoming less special because more people were reading my favorite blog.
I think you want to be special -- that's an entirely legit and useful desire. The part that needs adjusting is deriving your specialness from obscurity of your interests.
You should nurture that feeling if it drives you to push ahead to the next level of excellence that is beyond what is common today.
If it means you are just trying to be different for the sake of social signaling, then it is not quite so useful a feeling.
I've read that the CEO of Levi's recommends washing jeans very infrequently.
Won't they smell? I have a pretty clean white-collar lifestyle, but I'm concerned about wearing mine even once or twice between machine washing. Is it considered socially acceptable to re-wear jeans?
I usually wear jeans about three, sometimes four, times between washes. I haven't noticed any smell, and haven't heard any complaints either.
I've found the results are very different between living in a hot city and a cold city. When I lived in a hot, coastal city, I was never able to rewear anything; in my current cold city I can (theoretically, mind you) go days without a shower.
Who knows if this really works, but the Levi's Vice President of Women's Design recommends leaving your jeans in the freezer overnight once a month (to kill smelly bacteria).
Most jeans you aren't supposed to wash too often, since it can make them fade and wear out faster, but you still want to wash them when they seem dirty like when you spill on them, get really sweaty in them, or if they smell. I wash mine every 3-5 wears which seems to be a good amount.
If you're wearing raw denim, you're not supposed to wash your jeans at all but raw denim is kind of a niche thing anyways.
I can see how freezing might help with smell, but what confuses me is sweat. If I wear pants more than about 4 times in a row, they start to itch, and I don't see how freezing would help with that. I don't think I sweat unusually much.
Meta: I didn't read this thread for some time and only later got back to it (when I ran out of comments :-). On reflection I think it is due to the negative connotations with 'stupid'. We can hope that everyone here is immune to the halo effect. Or we can look for a better title.
'Simple questions'
'Quick questions' (implies urgency)
'Naive questions' (still connotations but not so strong ones)
'Less available Answers' (putting the idea on its head)
The reason for calling it stupid questions is to reassure people that they won't lose reputation or be insulted for asking questions that might be obvious to other people.
OK. I understand that. Makes sense. The simple/quick questions presumably go to the open thread. But the approach still reduced the number of readers of these questions.
Maybe, but previous iterations of this thread have gotten hundreds of comments so I don't think it's a big deal.