Great list! Hope you don't mind a couple of questions.
I hereby vow to donate 1% of my income below the taxation threshold and 10% of any income beyond that to a mix of GiveWell, CFAR, MIRI and Wikipedia of my choosing.
Any particular reason to donate to Wikipedia? I ask because I just read this interesting article about Wikimedia donations that was posted on the FB EA thread a few days ago.
Also, how many applications per month?
Great list! Hope you don't mind a couple of questions.
Thanks! There would be little point in posting to a discussion board if I wasn't expecting discussion.
Any particular reason to donate to Wikipedia? I ask because I just read this interesting article about Wikimedia donations that was posted on the FB EA thread a few days ago.
Until a few minutes ago I thought that people would on average not donate enough to Wikipedia enough. Actually, my thought was more like "Wikipedia was so useful in the past and I expect it to be useful in the future too, so I could donate a small amount to make up for my use." But I am revising that thought as we speak. The larger point anyhow was to signal that I am not completely sold on effective altruism and might also donate to the Red Cross or so.
Also, how many applications per month?
I have until the end of this year to decide. A modest goal would be one per week, but it would be way more effective if I make the rate dependent on time and domain. So let's say - and let me say that this won't be the final number - one per week for stuff in industry that is not seasonal and an adjusted number for seasonal stuff.
My list of goals, nice habits to have and general goodness tends to grow in length instead of shrinking for various reasons but I can make progress anyhow in implementing it. Also I know that having way too many goals at once is harmful, so here's the obvious caveat: This is a general list and brainstorming so far, with no real plan for realiable implementation, so take the goals, the length of the list and the commentary with the proverbial grain of salt. (Legend: "I vow" is certain, "I will" actually means "maybe")
Charity: There has been a delay in forming my contract for my student's job and thus also a delay in payment, which made me think about money a lot more than usual. Since for various reasons my cashflow will improve I hereby vow to donate 1% of my income below the taxation threshold and 10% of any income beyond that to a mix of GiveWell, CFAR, MIRI and Wikipedia of my choosing.
Health and charity: The weird case where self-interest and the public interest coincide applies for three things I have in mind
Education: No university and no school can offer comprehensive education, it has to come from many sources.
Travel: This might just as well put this under the education heading, but it deserves its own spot. I will travel to at least one country I have not yet set foot in, alone. Since I live in Germany, the bar is relatively low, but this is one goal that tends to fuel itself.
Interviewing: I will send out applications for part-time jobs, internships and stipends. Since I can control the material I send but not the answers I receive, the goal is set to the former. For far too long I have ignored the usual advice of getting at least one of each in internships, stipends, part-time-jobs and maybe a year/half-year abroad so I am looking for ways to fix that. The most obvious is to send out applications like crazy. This obviously ties into the points education and travel.
Some ideas I had before but I am unsure of in the face of total workload are to subscribe to a higher quality publication like the Economist and read at least one article every week or to read at least one book per month in addition to the audiobooks from above.
Currently open threads are weekly and very well received. However they tend to fill up quickly. Personally I fear that my contribution will drown unless posted early on so I tend to wait if I want to add a new top level post. Does anyone else have this impression? Someone with better coding skills than me could put this statistically by plotting the number of top level posts and total posts over time: If the curve is convex people tend to delay their posts.
So should open threads be more frequent and if so what frequency?
The Anti-Drug
I've seen that a lot of drugs seem to act like "gratification borrowers": they take gratification/happiness from the future and spend it all on the present, sometimes extremely quickly, then leave you feeling miserable for a certain duration, the "low" or "hangover".
I was wondering whether there was any drug that did the opposite, that functioned like delayed gratification: a drug that makes you feel utterly miserable at first, then eventually leaves you with a long-lasting feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment, and joy.
Does anyone here know of such a thing?
Exercise.
But more seriously, try asking this again in the next open thread, this one seems flooded.
It will be on Audible, I'm not sure if they have restrictions on where it will be available globally. Do you know more Metus? This will be the first book that we've personally put onto Audible. We certainly want it to be available globally. It will also be available on iTunes.
I don't, sorry, that's why I was asking. Sometimes publishers have unreasonable delays when publishing in other jurisdictions than the US because of licencing problems but that should not be a problem if all participants agree.
Can you give us an idea of the sort of listener numbers you've seen for your current Sequence audio offerings?
So far we've relied on people coming to the sequences we've produced via the LessWrong site. As an example of numbers we've had about 100 people purchase the "How to Actually Change Your Mind" sequence.
Any reasons in particular it wouldn't be reasonable to extrapolate those numbers?
"The Sequences" is a mega volume and we're just unsure how well it will sell. We will be making them available on Audible and iTunes in an effort to spread the ideas further.
Are there reviews?
Maybe some previous listeners could let you know what they thought. I can let you know we've had 0 complaints of the audio quality.
Audible
Will it be available globally?
Reduced consumption of animal products, more specifically meat should help my health and both my purse and the global poor through reduced food prices. For reducing meat consumption in general it seems easy to just replace meat in a lot of dishes with cheese or substitute meaty dishes with some scrambled eggs. What can I do for variety? I am especially looking for cheap, fast and/or convenient methods to put together a meal. I am very willing to trade off fast for the other two as I can listen to audiobooks or similar while preparing food.
I'm unsure this is the right decision for me, given that I don't particularly enjoy partying or drinking. Why did you join a frat? What did you get out of it?
Also the German name suggests European location which means that fraternities are pretty much dead around here.
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My new years resolution, as part of a longer-term goal to become better at coding, is to make at least one commit to github every day in 2015. Not all of these will be public, because some of them will be currently private code associated with my lab work. But, I'll post a screenshot at the end of the year.
Has anyone tried a similar thing, have advice for me, or think that this is a terrible idea?
Personally it sems that number of commits is a metric too easy to game. If you generally are honest with yourself, keep it, but I wouldn't use it if I were to set a goal for a group of students. Another metric that is less easy to game on a personal level is time spent with your programming environment open, which is effective if you tend to either not start programming or stop prematurely. Finally the ideal metric is to have a set of features or a certain output you want to achieve and have that as a goal with the caveat that these goals tend to be too hard to achieve in the mean time.
So overall, I'd recommend time spent programming as a weekly goal and a final product as an overarching goal with the explicit option of re-negotiation.