Burning cats is another good example. Can you feel how much fun it is to burn cats? Some people used to have all sorts of fun by burning cats. And this one is harder to do the wrong sort of justification based on bad models than either burning witches or torturing heretics.

Edit: Well, just scrolled down to where you talk about torturing animals. Beat me to it I guess...

He doesn't need to stall for time to transfigure. He could have already been doing it over the last two chapters.

I have one of these. Can confirm, pretty good relative to other similarly priced knives I've tried, and even better than a high quality knife of the same age, when both hadn't been properly maintained.

In the spirit of this thread, take a typing class. I find that taking classes are an effective way to get over motivation blocks, if that's what is preventing you from learning touch typing.

I'm a math undergrad, and I definitely spend more time in the second sort of style. I find that my intuition is rather reliable, so maybe that's why I'm so successful at math. This might be hitting into the "two cultures of mathematics", where I am definitely on the theory builder/algebraist side. I study category theory and other abstract nonsense, and I am rather bad (relative to my peers) at Putnam style problems.

The difference is that saying there is a territory is also a model. The way I would rephrase map/territory into this language is "the model is not the data."

This is the best place to apply effort for my goals, because I think that there might be some problems underlying MIRI's epistemology and philosophy of math that is causing confusion in some of their papers.

That it hasn't been radically triumphant isn't strong evidence towards its lack of world-beating potential though. Pragmatism is weird and confusing, perhaps it just hasn't been exposited or argued for clearly and convincingly enough. Perhaps it historically has been rejected for cultural reasons ("we're doing physicalism so nyah"). I think there is value on clearly presenting it to the LW/MIRI crowd. There are unresolved problems with a naturalistic philosophy that should be pointed out, and it seems that pragmatism solves them.

As for originality, I'm not sure how think about this. Pretty much everything has already been thought of, but it is hard to read all of the literature to be familiar with it. So how do you write? Acknowledge that there probably is some similar exposition, but we don't know where it is? What if you've come up with most of these ideas yourself? What if every fragment of your idea has been thought of, but it has never been put together in this particular way (which I suspect is going to be the case with us). The only reason for not appearing to be original is so not to seem arrogant to people like you who've read these arguments before.

Do you have direct, object-level criticisms of our version of pragmatism? Because that would be great. We've been having a hard time finding ones that we haven't already fixed, and it seems really unlikely that there aren't any. (I've been working on this with OP)

The computable algorithm isn't a meta-model though. It's just you in a different substrate. It's not something the agent can run to figure out what to do because it necessarily take more computing power. And there is nothing preventing such a pragmatic agent from having a universe-model that is computable, considering finding a computable algorithm approximating itself, and copying that algorithm over and over.

Intervals and ratios are going to be essentially the same thing for conventional pomodoros. They are some time on, some time off, repeat. It might be weird to have variable pomodoros since the break is for mental fatigue, not reward. Perhaps some mechanism to reward you with an M&M at some time randomly in the second half of your pomodoros?