A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy -- but going from that to "a billionaire must be unusually happy", or even "most billionaires are unusually happy", seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.

One thing I muse over sometimes in the context of billionaires is that, by and large, we should expect them to be strange and often unhappy people - simply because anyone more normal and well-adjusted would have stopped at, say, $10 million and $10 million typically doesn't accidentally turn into billions. Continuing past the point where all one's real needs are met indicates a bizarrely low estimate of the utility of switching to consumption and away from earning additional money (or perhaps the inability to stop working).

I tried it (for building muscle), kept to the instructions fairly strictly and saw improvements over my regular workout, but nowhere near the results described in the book. Much of the book makes sense, but it might be overly specific to his own physiology, and/or have non-functional components mixed in by mistake.

Very good post Louie! I agree with all the points, pretty much.

Number 11 seems especially important - it seems like a common trap for people in our crowd to try to over-optimize, so for me having an enjoyable life is a very high priority. A way of thinking that seems to work personally is to work on the margin rather than trying to reorganize my life top-down - to try to continually be a bit more awesome, work with more interesting people, get a bit more money, invest a bit more energy, etc, than yesterday.

In contrast, if I started out trying to allocate the resources I had access to / could gain access to in an optimal manner I suspect I would be paralyzed.

The discussion section sounds like a solid idea. As for making LW less intimidating, I'd rank it as the grace period > doing nothing > "karma coward", though I think users should be able to exit the grace period earlier by choice, and also possibly the score of comments on users in the grace period should be hidden (not just kept from affecting the total karma).

Seeing your comments plummet in score might be demoralizing, even if it doesn't affect your total score.

how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist?

A very, very large portion.

When I was a child, I read a tract published by Inter-Varsity Press called "The salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer". It's a story about a Christian who tries to actually live according to Christian virtues. Eventually, he concludes that he can't; in a world in which so many people are starving and suffering, he can't justify spending even the bare minimum food and money on himself that would be necessary to keep him alive.

It troubled me for years, even after I gave up religion. It's stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you're killing someone. (It's even more stressful now that I can actually afford to do these things regularly.)

You can rationalize that allowing yourself little luxuries will enable you to do enough more good to make up for the lives you could have saved. (Unlikely; the best you can do is buy yourself "offsets"; but you'd usually save more lives with more self-denial.) You can rationalize that saving lives today inevitably leads to losing more lives in the future. (This carried me for a long time.) But ultimately, the only way I find to cope is not caring.

Recently, Michael Vassar told me I was one of the nicest people he knows. And yet I know that every day, I make decisions that would horrify almost everyone in America with their callousness. Other people act the same way; they just avoid making the decisions, by not thinking about the consequences of their actions.

I'm not a nice person inside, by any stretch of the imagination. I just have less of a gap between how nice my morals tell me to be, and how nice I act. This gap, in most people, is so large, that although I have morals that are "worse" than everyone around me, I act "nicer" than most of them by trying to follow them.

How's the JVM on concurrency these days? My loose impression was that it wasn't actually all that hot.

I took part of the 2009 summer program during the vacation of my day job as a software developer in Sweden. This entailed spending five weeks with the smartest and most dedicated people I have ever met, working on a wide array of projects both short- and long-term, some of which were finished by the time I left and some of which are still on-going.

My biggest worry beforehand was that I would not be anywhere near talented enough to participate and contribute in the company of SIAI employees and supporters. That seems to not have occurred, though I don't claim to have anywhere near the talent of most others involved. Some of the things I was involved with during the summer was work on the Singularity Summit website as well continuing the Uncertain Future project for assigning probability distributions to events and having the conclusions calculated for you. I also worked on papers with Carl Shulman and Nick Tarleton, read a massive amount of papers and books, took trips to San Fransisco and elsewhere, played games, discussed weird forms of decision theories and counter-factual everything, etc, etc.

My own comparative advantages seem to be having the focus to keep hacking away at projects, as well as the specialized skills that came from having a CS background and some experience (less than a year though) of working in the software industry. I'm currently writing this from the SIAI house, to which I returned about three weeks ago. This time I mainly focused on getting a job as a software developer in the Bay area (I seem to have succeeded), for the aims of earning money (some of which will go to donations) and also making it easier for me to participate in SIAI projects.

I'd say that the most important factor for people considering applying should be if they have strong motivations and a high level of interest in the issues that SIAI involves itself with. Agreeing with specific perceived beliefs of the SIAI or people involved with it is not necessary, and the disagreements will be brought out and discussed as thoroughly as you could ever wish for. As long as the interest and motivation is there, the specific projects you want to work with should work itself out nicely. My own biggest regret is that I kept lurking for so long before getting in touch with the people here.

There are more examples in a paper authored by Joshua Knobe on moral cognition and blameworthiness but I'm too lazy to get the reference. (Why don't you give ma slight impetus in that direction?)

This sounds like a cool paper and I'd love to read it - can you track down the citation, please? ;)

Ainslie's answer is that he should set a hard-and-fast rule: "I will never drink alcoholism".

You probably meant to write "alcohol" here.

All data, even anecdotal, on how to beat akrasia is great, and this sounds like a method that might work well in many cases. If you wanted to raise your odds of succeeding even more you could probably make your oath in front of a group of friends or family members, or even include a rule about donating your money or time if you failed, preferably to a cause you hated for bonus motivation.

I'd like to give a public oath myself, but I'm going away shortly and will be busy with various things, so I don't know how much time I will have for self-improvement. In somewhat of a coincidence, I just received "Breakdown of Will" in the mail yesterday. How about this.. I proudly and publicly swear to read the entire book "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie and write an interesting post on LW based on the book before July 17th 2009, so help me Bayes.

Post here if you live in Sweden.