If you ask a Software Architect which database technology you should use

Well, it depends on the architect, I suppose. I would say "write your application in a modular way so that it doesn't rely on specific features of the underlying database, and if you need to make exceptions to this principle, make sure the relevant code sections and dependencies are well highlighted and documented."

Note that the comparison (more to do with X than Y) isn't very helpful for cases where X and Y are not exclusive, and/or related. For this particular topic, the quality and quantity of work in many fields has a direct effect on your ability to negotiate for salary (for three reasons: your actual ability to positively impact the business, your confidence in asking for what you're worth, and your (prospective) employer's comfort level in treating you differently from your nominal peers).

Also, 5 minutes of salary negotiation is bull crap. There is no excuse not to spend dozen hours of research and have multiple 30 minute conversations every year or two. Of course, you should put the same level of thought and effort into other areas of job-satisfaction (commute, hours, duties, etc.) as well.

I'm told, and quite willing to believe, that your salary has more to do with the five minutes of salary negotiation than the next several years of work. I am also told that salary negotiation is very much a skill.

As such, it seems it would be worth a fairly substantial amount of time and money to practice and/or get coaching in this skill. Is this done? That is, how likely am I to be able to find someone, preferably someone who has worked on the business end of salary negotiation at somewhere like Google, who I can pay to practice salary negotiation with?

ETA: I've read extensively about how to negotiate (though of course there's always something more). What I'm interested in is practice.

My particular goal is get enough power to save the world, which does sometimes disagree with maximum vampire-mode.

Maybe instead of thinking in 1000-year-old vampire terms for this, it's better to think in intelligence explosion terms. For example, let's say you have a list of goals you want to accomplish. One is get more sleep, which you expect, among other things, to improve your focus. Another is meditate intensely for 10 minutes every day, which you expect, among other things, to improve your willpower. Each of these goals helps to some degree with the other. If you had a lot of goals that all improved your capacity to work towards the other goals, and improved your capacity in general, then you could potentially see exponential growth in your ability to do things. (Some of your goals should probably be object-level though, because it's good to intermix self-improvement goals with object-level goals to see if you are actually building the kind of capacities you need.)

But lets say that you've tried and failed at both the meditation and sleep goals in the past. In that case, you are having a hard time getting the exponential growth cycle started, and you're probably better off taking things from another angle, kind of like a game of sudoku. So develop and test a hypothesis about why your meditation goal failed, or read up on strategies people have to overcome whatever problem you think you were having. Or alternatively, try to find the small capacity-building thing that you think is quite likely to stick for the long term, and try to achieve it so you can gain a toehold. Then celebrate and attempt the capacity-building thing that you think is the next hardest to get to stick, etc. This also doubles as establishing a success spiral and builds the ability to maintain commitments to yourself (and is also kaizen).

Probably the easiest sort of "toehold" to establish is just to start learning more about yourself. Read up on ugh fields, reinforcement, and stuff like it. Maybe spill your guts to a friend, or start keeping a productivity diary... every entry you make has a small expected self-knowledge gain. Basically try to get as much insight as you can in to yourself, because self-knowledge is an irreversible capacity gain (unlike, say, a habit, which, once lost, will have to be re-established).

(I'm sure I'm not the only one who's wondered if the effective altruist community is best off overtly telling everyone we are focused on things like Givewell, MIRI, etc. but covertly choosing to focus most of our resources on capacity-building, knowing that the goals we've set for ourselves are big enough that they aren't going to be realistically accomplished with our current cohort.)

Is the referenced book useful if I'd like to know more about the subject?

I'm fairly good at saying no. I would consider myself unusually productive, but not unusually busy...because I'm fairly good at saying no.

1. • At work if a boss asks me to do something that seems interesting but where I don't have time, I'll say something like "I currently have too much on my plate to handle X. These are my priorities, should I drop something to do X?" For example, I recently used this when I was asked to do some market research but didn't have time.

2. If they ask me to do something I'm not interested, I'll say "I'm not very good at X, but (person B) is. I'd be happy to take something off their plate if they can handle X." I recently used this when asked to do several programming tasks I wasn't particularly interested in or good at.

3. If the boss insists on me doing X that I'm not interested in, or on getting everything done, I'll say something like "I can handle it this time as a special case, but we need to work out a different solution going forward."

4. If a friend asks me I'm much more blunt-I'll explicitly say that I'm not really interested. E.g. one of my friends recently asked me to help organize an event, and I told them I really dislike logistics work.

Overall in all of these situations I felt slightly guilty. I like being helpful and would prefer to contribute.

1. I receive a lot of requests, so I default to rejecting responsibilities. I generally accept them only if they seem particularly interesting or valuable.

2. Less empathetic/compassionate than average

3. Yes. Mostly I just learned political skills so that I could say no politely.

Suggestion for new post title: Beeminder (or StickK) Can Help You

The post doesn't seem to be about lucky breaks. And it apparently isn't specifically about learning.

The crux seems to be that a systematic approach to incorporating things that work can improve your life. I concur.

People frequently refer to one-off positive events as "lucky breaks", which is why I used that phrase. But I don't care about the word luck specifically. The point of the post is to take one-off positive events or things that worked unexpectedly well and make them happen repeatedly and automatically.

Noted.

Very few people respond to an unexpected positive event with "now I'll set up a system to make this happen repeatedly."

I'm not sure how a "game night" qualifies as an "unexpected positive event". Surely game makers are aware that games are positive experiences for people...

Humans are generally good at repeatedly doing things that they intentionally tried and worked well, but not good at spotting the things that happened without effort on their part, but which could be copied and repeated.

...and I don't know that this is the case. Can you give an example of how people are "generally not good at this"?

It seems to me people (pretty commonly) intentionally incorporate things that work into their lives, and do so on an recurring schedule. You happen (luckily or not) upon something you enjoy/is helpful/is profitable/just works and you make it a part of your life.

Isn't that the basis for how most people spend their time? Isn't that just called "learning" and putting what you learn into practice? If not, can you explain the difference between what you are proposing and learning what works and then doing what you learn?

What do the examples have to do with "luck"? Each example seems to be more about paying attention to the circumstances in your present situation and then making a choice. If those choices yield good results, maybe you make them again. If those choices have less than good results, stop making them.

My understanding of luck is a situation where the circumstances "break" in your favor regardless of your attention or intention, or even in opposition to most likely outcome. (e.g. I was lucky not to get injured when X happened and many poeple around me were injured.)

What I see described in this post is something much closer to my concept of "common sense".

...

Note:

This post reminds me of aspects of a recent discussion on LW.

I'm confused as to why people are voting it up. It is a nice reminder to do stuff you enjoy, ask for help and pay attention to trends, and I'm not disagreeing with it's rating per se... but I'm sincerely interested as to why, at the time of my comment, this post has drawn the apparent acclaim that it has compared to say, this post or this one (the latter post I also think is rather nice-but-obvious).

Do people at LW know and really like the author of this post?

Is there some very valuable and novel aspect to the content I am overlooking?

Are people upvoting because they simply say, "This is generally true"?

Anyway, the post is a nice reminder to reach out to an expert so I am going to try do do that today. (Because the "systematic luck" I've observed in my life comes from not simply reading good advice, but incorporating it by actually doing.)

But I do think this post is a good example of the gaps created by the current "like/don't like" rating format and inferential slience that exists in the comment system.

I'm working on helping effective altruists make more money and be more successful in their careers. 80,000 hours has done a great job helping people make high-level strategic decisions such as "should I work in Law or Finance?" My focus is on helping people who've chosen a career path be more effective and make more money. For example, I've helped several of my friends negotiate an increase in their salaries and hope to spread these skills amongst the EA community at large.

One example of this has been individual conversations regarding career advice. I've also been talking to people who have thought about this issue, such as Alexei or the folks at CFAR. By working with several people, I'm hoping to get a set of coherent career advice and turn this into a course that EAs could benefit from.

One candidate so far seems to be a course on negotiating your salary and promotions. Other common questions have included:

• How do you learn to model people/organizations/markets effectively, in order to find the most valuable problems to solve?
• Which skills should you prioritize learning in order to maximize income?
• What factors are important in choosing a job, and what factors should be ignored?