Small typo:

bright screens ant night

I would like to say entrepreneurship means different things. The plumber I call when my pipes are clogged is definitely an entrepreneur - he is self-employed and employs a help, he does not come alone. Yet there is not much idea behind it. It is just simply so that in these kinds of professions self-employment is more common than working for large corporations.

I have the impression that if you are approaching it from a Silicon Valley / Paul Grahamesque direction, what you call entrepreneurship is that subset of it that scales up easily, this seems to be the most important determining factor. Web based software, provided as a service and not as a purchasable shrinkwrap package, is the canonical example because it is relatively easy, free / cheap and barrier-free for theoretically even billions of people to start using something like Hipmunk or Beeminder. Their crucial feature is scaling up.

I think scaling up is why in such fields entrepreneurial ideas are dime a dozen, because of the ease of scaling means really high potential payoff and it means really intense competition - not only for customers but also e.g. for co-founders.

Compare opening a pizzeria in a small town. How much idea you need for that? Chances are there isn't a competitor at all and then you offer the basic types, if you have a competitor you just spend a few hours googling up some less usual but delicious sounding recipes.

The point is, if you fail at that pizzeria, you are doing something wrong. If you fail at that insanely competitive infinitely-scalable market, then it is not a failure and has no special reason, it is just like not winning the Olympics: someone was better, that is all.

So this year I've stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?

Are you sure there isn't another factor causing improved grades? My impression was that it was pretty well-established that exercise improves mental performance.

Or possibly it's the amount of time you spent exercising, which gave you less time to do other things? Were you spending a lot of time working out? If so, you may want to look into high-intensity interval training to get the benefits of physical exercise in as little time as possible.

Another idea: save your workouts for the end of the day, so you don't have the post-workout feeling all day and will still feel like you need to get stuff done?

Engineering solutions (RO desalination powered by photovoltaics) exist right now to deliver practically limitless amounts of potable water in a sustainable manner for around $1/m3. That is 1 cent per 10 litre bucket.

I am not sure who is feeling the pain in California... $1/m3 may be too much to pay for broadacre farming. But for city residents, who (in Australia) typically use ~300l/person/day, including lawn care, this seems very affordable.

Incidentally: Perth, Australia, used to rely on dams and groundwater to supply its needs. When I visited the dams 10 years ago they looked about what Californian dams look like now. This year, the dams are nearly full, and the annoying ads urging reduced water consumption have disappeared. What has changed? Two RO desalination plants were built, and now roughly half of Perth's fresh water supply comes from these plants. To power the plants, two small-ish wind energy farms have been built. So perhaps this is the right solution for California also...?

I've edited the LW-wiki to make a list of LWers interested in making debate tools..

In general, I think it'd be useful to make a post similar to the "What are you working on threads", so that people with similar interest can find each other. What do people think of a "People working on X repository" post?

I would guess he's thinking of some anti democratic ideas.

The former; I was being precise. I don't think the reverse direction is true. My beliefs in both directions come from a combination of my understanding of evolutionary psychology plus anecdotal observations of myself and others. I can elaborate but I'll also ask why others don't believe this.

Also I should add this obviously isn't true for all males. I'm just trying to model the average case.

The one that makes people think cognitive biases are distinct entities.

Meditation: My blog is a terse, cryptic, rambling, ungrammatical rabbit hole, but it's highly opinionated and absolutely packed with links and resources:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/articles/

Here are two practical posts:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/additive-meditation/ https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/

Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram, Kenneth Folk, and Culadasa have systems that can get you very far depending on how well they fit you.

Meditation: Shinzen Young is the best available material I know of on Mindfulness. Under articles he has a bunch of short primers examples (PDFs):

An Outline of Practice

Basic Mindfulness

What is Equanimity?

He uses a couple concepts that pattern match to woo, but he's very measurable results and clear instructions oriented.