This is entirely not obvious to me, given that the motivation to go get a job will be less.
Not sure what you mean. If you can have a paying job and some of your 'welfare' on top of it, the incentive is obviously greater than if getting a paying job meant giving up all welfare. This matters, especially for low-paying jobs which are the kinds welfare recipients are most likely to get.
There are factors pointing both ways here. If getting a job means giving up benefits for the unemployed, or means-tested welfare that you'll become ineligible for, that's a disincentive to get a job. But utility isn't linear in money, and so a job paying N dollars will always be more attractive to someone making zero dollars than the same job is to someone on UBI worth K dollars -- and increasingly so the higher K is. That's also a disincentive.
Which of these disincentives is bigger depends on the sizes of N and K and the specifics of the welfare system. I think I'd usually expect the incentive landscape on the margins to be friendlier under UBI, but it's by no means a certainty.
Why would you need to go to a cemetery for that? "Hey, pencil on my desk, I'm a sentient being who can respond to its environment and you're not!"
Mocking tombstones is edgy and transgressive. Mocking pencils is just weird.
Interviewer: So Mr. Larity, you seem like a great fit for this job so far, do your values align with those of our company?
Clarity: (hmmm, I remember reading about values on the LessWrong wiki) ...
It is not known whether humans have terminal values that are clearly distinct from another set of instrumental values. Humans appear to adopt different values at different points in life. Nonetheless, if the theory of terminal values applies to humans', then their system of terminal values is quite complex. The values were forged by evolution in the ancestral environment to maximize inclusive genetic fitness. These values include survival, health, friendship, social status, love, joy, aesthetic pleasure, curiosity, and much more. Evolution's implicit goal is inclusive genetic fitness, but humans do not have inclusive genetic fitness as a goal. Rather, these values, which were instrumental to inclusive genetic fitness, have become humans' terminal values (an example of subgoal stomp).
Humans cannot fully introspect their terminal values. Humans' terminal values are often mutually contradictory, inconsistent, and changeable.
Interview: Carlos, I was asking you about values?
Clarity: Oh yeah, I reckon I have those values, so yeah, I'd make a great fit...
How do you communicate in the instrumental rationality real world when your mind is immersed in the epistemic rationality world, if that makes sense? Hopefully the situation I've described illustates what I'm trying to say
If you find yourself so engrossed with abstract epistemic considerations that you can't deal with concrete ones, it may be time to start wondering how much instrumental rationality your approach to this epistemic rationality thing is buying you.
The best players of any game usually do a lot of systematizing, but there is such a thing as too much meta.
Thanks tried that. Not sure it worked as I didn't learn anything concrete. We spent 30 mins in discussion though (which he didn't need to do as there was no further value he could extract from me).
If he's a headhunter than he might value the relationship with you to call you up when he has another job.
Maybe, but I've rarely gotten more than one offer from a given headhunter -- actually, I've gotten multiple offers from one company more often than through one headhunting agency. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that most of them have a library of openings and look in real time for candidates matching them, rarely going into their back catalog.
Multiple offers might be more common for people with less specialized skillsets than mine, though.
How can one assemble the next 'Paypal Mafia'?
I don't know, but if you could get a working plan by asking on public boards, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be worth billions of dollars.
The Good American Witch by Peggy Bacon. The witch grants wishes, but always with an odd price-- for example, a girl who wants curly blonde hair has to give up her eyebrows. As a result, she gets eyebrows which match her hair. Towards the end of the book, a boy wants to become an artist. He's told the price is that his wish won't be fulfilled until after some large number of days. At the end of the book, he's become an artist, and only then realized that while he's been studying art, the requisite number of days have passed.
The Paladin by C. J. Cherryh-- as I recall, it has quite a lot about martial arts training.
Would the Harry Potter books count as an approximate match? Talent is important, but the characters also spend a lot of time on study and practice.
I haven't read the Potter books for a long while, but from what I recall they're pretty good at avoiding instant-gratification solutions when there's some specific plot coupon that the protagonists need to master. The Patronus charm, the Polyjuice potion, etc. Harry even tries hard and fails to learn an essential skill once, with Occulemency, which is practically unheard of in fiction.
It doesn't seem to generalize very well, though. The protagonists are mediocre students aside from Hermione, and after the first couple of books her studiousness seems to be treated more as a character quirk than a serious advantage. And it's rarely more than a plot coupon that they need: most of their final successes come from dumb luck or outside intervention.
How can I reduce the stress of public speaking?
In the short term, rehearse well with as close a simulation of your eventual stage as you can manage, or use prescription or nonprescription anxiolytics, or try one of the many speakers' tricks for reducing stage fright. Most of the latter probably won't work, but some might.
In the long run, the best way is probably exposure: doing a lot of public speaking, perhaps in front of progressively larger audiences.
Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment, since they have resources and motivation to lay out more comprehensive contingency plans than anyone else. That extra productivity from "Job 2" doesn't just vanish into the aether. Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.
The ones who lose out from a higher minimum wage would be the middle managers, who are then less free to treat bottom-tier workers as interchangeable, disposable, safe targets for petty abuse. With higher wages, those workers will have more of the financial security that makes them willing to risk standing up for themselves, and specialized skills that make them more expensive to replace. That's what wage compression, reductions in turnover, and improvements in organizational efficiency look like from the trenches.
Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.
The poorest people do not directly benefit from minimum wage, because they don't have jobs. Many participants in the informal economy are also very poor.
One option I didn't think of in the ancestor is that people pushed into the informal sector may still be showing up as employed in the sources being referenced: people making a lower-than-minimum-wage living as e.g. junk collectors are sometimes counted as such depending on methodology. We could pick out this effect by asking for personal earnings as well as employment status: if higher minimum wages are coming out of corporate margins somewhere, we'd expect average earnings (at least in the lower segment of the workforce) to go up, but we wouldn't expect that if it's pushing people into the informal sector. A survey would probably have to be carefully designed to have the resolution to pick this up, though.
About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation.
I can think of a few examples where I've seen directly propositioning someone work, but these examples were among rather promiscuous people, so I think your point stands.
On the other hand, if you've invited someone up for coffee (or just said "do you want to come back to my place?", which is pretty much the same offer)
Actually, I'd interpret this very differently - inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext. But "do you want to come back to my place?" gives no pretext and its obviously for sex (assuming you've kissed already).
Obviously, I do know that inviting someone for coffee means sex might happen (or at least it does in some contexts). But there's also people who invite people over to "watch a movie" or "smoke weed" and this is more of a grey area because they might actually want to watch a movie.
Actually, I'd interpret this very differently - inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext.
It's a pretext, sure. That's the point. The standard getting-to-know-you script does not allow for directly asking someone for sex (unless you're already screwing them on the regular; "wanna get some ice cream and fuck?" is acceptable, if a little crass, on the tenth date) so we've developed the line as a semi-standardized cover story for getting a couple hours of privacy with someone. You shouldn't read it as "I want coffee", but rather as "I want to be alone with you, so here's a transparent excuse". There are more creative ways to ask the same thing, but because they're more creative (and therefore further outside the standard cultural script), they're more prone to misinterpretation.
Compare the Seventies-era cliche of "wanna come look at my etchings?"
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Once I heard a debate about fantasy literature, how culture impacts the world building.
In Western fantasy -- think Tolkien's Middle Earth -- you have the good kingdom on one end of the map (their backs are protected by the ocean, they only have to fight on one front), the evil kingdom is on the other side of the map, the heroes fight and despite all the complications they ultimately win.
In Eastern European fantasy -- think Sapkowski's Witcher -- you have the more-or-less good kingdom in the middle, surrounded by evil kingdoms (often much larger) on all sides; victory is impossible, the heroes fight to survive yet another day, and they consider themselves lucky when they do.
I would add that in Russian fantasy -- think Lukyanenko's Night Watch -- the balance between good and evil is considered a fact of life and no one even tries to change it anymore, both live in the same kingdom; the good guys only wake up when the balance seems to shift too much on the side of evil.
So yeah, culture has an unconscious impact on optimism / pesimism.
I'm not sure about grand strategy, but I've definitely noticed that attitudes toward government, even that of the nominal good guys, are way more cynical in Eastern European (including Russian) fantasy. The arms of government it touches on often also strike me as more modern, involving things like special forces and organized espionage in otherwise medieval settings, but that might just be because I'm more used to the anachronisms in Western fantasy.