http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/22vqhx/chapter_by_chapter_summary_of_hpmor_without/

The current state of my understanding (briefly):

1. I very much understand reductionism and the distinction between the map and the territory. And I very much understand that probability is in the mind.
2. From what I understand, prior probability is just the probability you thought something was going to happen before having observed some evidence, and posterior probability is just the probability you think something will happen after having observed that evidence.
3. I don't really have a precise way of using evidence to update my beliefs though. I'm trying to think of and explain how I currently use evidence to update my beliefs, and I'm disappointed to say that I am struggling. I guess I just sort of think something along the lines of "I'd be unlikely that I observe X if A were really true. I observed X. I think it's less likely that A is true now."
4. I've made attempts at learning Bayes' Theorm and stuff. When I think it through slowly, it makes sense. But it really takes me time to think it through. Without referring to explanations and thinking it through, I forget it. And I know that that demonstrates my lack of "true" understanding. In general, my short term memory and ability to reason through quantitative things quickly seems to be well above average, but far from elite. Probably way below average amongst this community.

Most people believe very strongly that the best way to learn is to learn by doing. Particularly in the field of programming.

I have a different perspective. I see learning as very dependency based. Ie. there are a bunch of concepts you have to know. Think of them as nodes. These nodes have dependencies. As in you have to know A, B and C before you can learn D.

And so I'm always thinking about how to most efficiently traverse this graph of nodes. The efficient way to do it is to learn things in the proper order. For example, if you try to learn D without first understanding, say A and C, you'll struggle. I think that it'd be more efficient to identify your what your holes are (A and C) and address them first before trying to learn D.

I don't think that the "dive into a project" approach leads to an efficient traversal of this concept graph. That's not to say that it doesn't have its advantages. Here are some:

1. People tend to find the act of building something fun, and thus motivating (even if it has no^* use other than as a means to the end of learning).
2. It's often hard to construct a curriculum that is comprehensive enough. Doing real world projects often forces you to do things that are hard to otherwise address.
3. It's often hard to construct a curriculum that is ordered properly. Doing real world projects often is a reasonably efficient way of traversing the graph of nodes.

Side Notes:

I'm 22 years old, just got a job, and have the option of putting money in a 401k. More generally, I just started making money and need to think about how I'm going to invest and save it.

As far as long-term/retirement savings goes, the way I see it is that my goal is to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living when I'm "old" (70-80). I see a few ways that this can happen:

1. There is enough wealth creation and distribution by then such that I pretty much won't have to do anything. One way this could happen is if there was a singularity. I'm no expert on this topic, but the experts seem to be pretty confident that it'll happen by the time I retire.
   
   Median optimistic year (10% likelihood): 2022
   Median realistic year (50% likelihood): 2040
   Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood): 2075
   - http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
   
   And even if they're wrong and there's no singularity, it still seems to be very likely that there will be immense wealth creation in the next 60 or so years, and I'm sure that there'll be a fair amount of distribution as well, such that the poorest people will probably have reasonably comfortable lives. I'm a believer in Kurweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, but even if you project linear growth, there'd still be immense growth.
   
   Given all of this, I find thinking that "wealth creation + distribution over the next 60 years -> sufficient standard of living for everyone" is a rather likely scenario. But my logic here is very "outside view-y" - I don't "really understand" the component steps and their associated likelihoods, so my confidence is limited.
2. I start a startup, make a lot of money, and it lasts until retirement. I think that starting a startup and using the money to do good is the way for me to maximize the positive impact I have on the world, as well as my own happiness, and so I plan on working relentlessly until that happens. Ie. I'm going to continue to try, no matter how many times I fail. I may need to take some time to work in order to save up money and/or develop skills though.
   
   Anyway, I think that there is a pretty good chance that I succeed, in, say the next 20 years. I never thought hard enough about it to put a number on it, but I'll try it here.
   
   Say that I get 10 tries to start a startup in the next 20 years (I know that some take longer than 2 years to fail, but 2 years is the average, and it often takes shorter than 2 years to fail). At a 50% chance of success, that's a >99.9% chance that at least one of them succeeds (1-.5^10). I know 50% might seem high, but I think that my rationality skills, domain knowledge (eventually) and experience (eventually) give me an edge. Even at a 10% chance of success, I have about a 65% (1-.9^10) chance at succeeding in one of those 10 tries, and I think that 10% chance of success is very conservative.
   
   Things I may be underestimating: the chances that I judge something else (earning to give? AI research? less altruistic? a girl/family?) to be a better use of my time. Changes in the economy that make success a lot less likely. 
   
   Anyway, there seems to be a high likelihood that I continue to start startups until I succeed, and there seems to be a high likelihood that I will succeed by the time I retire, in which case I should have enough money to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living for the rest of my life.
3. I spend my life trying and failing at startups, not saving any money, but I develop enough marketable skills along the way and I continue to work well past normal retirement age (assuming I keep myself in good physical and mental condition, and assuming that 1. hasn't happened). I'm not one who wants to stop working.
4. I work a normal-ish job, have a normal retirement plan, and save enough to retire at a normal age.

Part 1 was previously posted and it seemed that people likd it, so I figured that I should post part 2 - http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

Story

I was confused about Node Modules, so I did a bunch of research to figure out how they work. Explaining things helps me to understand them, and I figured that others might benefit from my explanation, so I wrote a blog post about them. However, I'm inexperienced and still unsure of exactly what's going on, so I started the blog post off with a disclaimer:

Disclaimer

I'm a bit of a noob. I just graduated from a coding bootcamp and am still trying to wrap my head around this stuff myself (that's actually why I'm writing this article). I tried to do my research, but I can't guarantee that everything is correct. Input from more knowledgeable people is very welcome.

My friend said that it's a bad idea to do that. He said:

You're literally discrediting yourself in the first sentence of the article. Stand by what you've written!

I interpreted what he said literally and basically responded by saying:

Why should I "stand by what I've written"? What I mean to communicate to the readers is that, "I'm x% sure of what I'm about to say." To "stand by what I've written" is to assign a higher confidence to the things I've written than what my true confidence is. It wouldn't even be a stretch to interpret "stand by what you've written" as meaning "claim that you're 100% sure of what you've written". Why would I do that?

This was stupid of me. He didn't mean "claim that you're 100% sure of what you've written". He didn't mean "pretend that you're way more confident in what you've written than what you really are". He meant, "I think that it comes across as you being less confident than you actually are. And so I think you should reword it to better communicate your confidence."

I shouldn't have interpreted what he said so literally. I should have thought about and responded to what I thought he meant to say. (Although, he also should have been more precise...)

Thesis

People often interpret and respond to statements literally. Instead of doing this, it's often useful to think about and respond to what the other person probably meant.

For example, "If I interpret what you said literally, then A. But you probably meant X, so B. If you meant Y, then C."

Depending on how confident you are in your interpretation, you should probably respond to a variety of possibilities. Like if you're < 80% sure that you know what they meant, you should probably respond to possibilities that have at least a 5% chance of being what they meant. I'm not sure whether 80 and 5 are the right numbers, but hopefully it communicates the point.

Why don't people do this?

I see two likely reasons:

1. The whole "argument is a war that I must win" attitude.
2. Habit.

Practical considerations

Edit: I have just learned that what I'm referring to is The Principle of Charity.

Modern microconomist Alfred Marshall explains that technology has greatly extended the power and reach of the planet's most gifted performers....He referenced a classical of the British opera singer Elizabeth Billington. She was a well-acclaimed soprano with a strong voice, that, naturally did not have access to a microphone or amplifier in 1798, let alone to MTV, CDs, iTunes, and Pandora. She could only reach a small audience. This limited her ability to dominate the market in the way that artists to do today. Marshall wrote, “so long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great [an increase] as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on those of the last.” 

- Wikipedia

Technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences. And to do so at no marginal cost. If a musician writes a song and puts it on iTunes, it doesn't cost him any money for one more person to download it.

The fact that technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences has implications on the consumer side of things as well. As a consumer, I can go on iTunes and choose the best music to buy. To understand my point, consider a different world. In this world iTunes doesn't exist. In this world the best music is 200 miles away, but mediocre music is only 5 miles away. Because traveling 200 miles is inconvenient, I choose the mediocre music.

In today's world of iTunes, this doesn't happen. Technology exists that allows us to reach large audiences and to do so at little/no marginal cost. And so, the consumer can (and will) choose the best the market has to offer.

Now for the implications on the supply side. We've already seen that consumers can and will choose the best the market has to offer. "The best the market has to offer" is usually provided by a small number of talented people. Think about it: the best artists, performers, writers, athletes etc. These talented people end up serving a large proportion of the market, and are paid accordingly. This... is The Superstar Effect.

Because of these joint consumption economies, there is a unique opportunity to create and capture value. If you are the best, you capture insane amounts of value. Thus, there is a huge incentive to be the best.

So, should you invest in an attempt to outdo The Superstar and capture this value? Well, investment decisions are all about expected value. Balancing risk with reward. In this case, the potential reward is huge. Astronomical. These joint consumption economies allow you to reach tremendous markets. However, the question is "how big is the risk?".

Outdoing The Superstar is a large and complex task, and I won't pretend to have all the answers. However, I've had this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind for years. My suspicion is that people drastically overestimate this risk, and that with a good plan and enough resources, you could have an excellent chance at "outdoing The Superstar".

Before moving on, let me go through the logic one more time:

• Today's joint consumption economies allow for firms to reach large amounts of people with little/no marginal costs.
• Thus, consumers have tons of options to choose from.
• Consumers often have similar enough tastes such that a large percentage of them end up choosing The Superstar.
• In serving all of these people, The Superstar has created and captured a ton of value.
• If another firm came along and outdid The Superstar, this new firm would replace The Superstar. It would now be the one to serve the large market, and would be compensated accordingly. There is a large reward for outdoing The Superstar.
• Investment is all about balancing risk and reward. Investing in an attempt to outdo The Superstar has a very large potential reward. The question is, "what's the risk?".

Outdoing The Superstar

People seem to view large ventures like starting startups as a roll of the dice. They say things like, "9 out of 10 startups fail". I don't see things that way. I don't see it as "a roll of the dice". I see it as a deterministic puzzle that can be solved.

I should qualify that previous statement. I'm not trying to make a philosophical point, just a practical one. People seem to be afraid of what I'll call, Large Puzzles. Because of their size and complexity, people seem to be put off by them, and they fall back on outside view arguments like "9 in 10 startups fail".

I'll admit that Large Puzzles are complex, but I maintain that with enough resources and with a good plan, a lot of them are very solvable. I sense that a lot of these large joint consumption winner-take-all industries are ripe for the taking, and that with enough resources and a good plan, they can be taken.

My confidence isn't that high though. I don't understand these Large Puzzles well enough to really say. What I'm referring to are "relatively strong suspicions", not "beliefs" (my thoughts are cloudy enough such that I'm having trouble being more precise than this, sorry).

Investing

This is a bit of an aside and a rant, but here we go. Investors currently seem to be heavily biased towards investing in businesses that can be built incrementally. They want to...

• See some sort of promise/traction before investing at all (usually).
• Invest 10s/100s of thousands of dollars in a seed round.
• See some more traction before they invest a couple/10s of millions in a series A.
• See some more traction before they invest 10s/100s in the next round.
• etc. etc.

Education

The Large Puzzle that I understand best is Education (which causes my System I to care disproportionately about it). I'll indulge myself and say it: the education system today is shit.

I think that Elon Musk said it well. He said (paraphrasing):

Consider The Dark Knight. It's awesome! It has all the best actors, directors, special effects etc. Now imagine if you took the same script and asked the local middle school to reproduce it. It'd suck. That's education.

I think that this division of resources is really the core of the problem. Things you could do once you pool resources:

• Put a lot of effort towards making each lesson great (in dath ilan, "One hour of instruction on a widely-used subject got the same kind of attention that an hour of prime-time TV gets on Earth"). Figure out how to word things properly. What examples to use. What analogies to give. Make lessons visual, animated, interactive. Gamify them and make them fun (when appropriate). Make them beautiful. Apply design thinking. Make them skimmable so students can refer back to them when they're studying. Include convenient references to things the student might have a question on.
• Break lessons into chunks and organize them according to their dependencies (this is an important and difficult task). I'm a big believer that knowledge is hierarchical. That concepts have dependencies (to know A, you have to know B). I think it makes a lot of sense to have students learn things that they have the proper foundation for. I think this makes more sense in the negative: you shouldn't have students learn things that they don't have the proper foundation for. (This is a bit of an aside, but I think that mastery should be fixed, and time should be variable. Currently it's the opposite.)
• Open up time for teachers to spend personal attention on their students. In today's system, they're usually too busy to do this. (Note: even with these great lessons, I still think that teachers will be useful. The lessons could be pretty good, so I'm not sure if they'd be necessary, but I suspect that they'd still be useful. I think using a human will still be the best way to diagnose and address the holes in a student's understanding.)
• Come up with great practice problems, exercises, projects etc. 
• Make tests way more accurate and effective. Make them smaller. And for gods sake, have them created by a separate financial entity than the entity that does the teaching!
• This applies to a lot of what I said above, but iterate, iterate, iterate!! See what works and what doesn't work and change. Given the amount of "experimental subjects (students)" and "technicians (teachers)", there's a tremendous opportunity to do this. Effective collaboration and coordination might be tough, but I sense that it's doable.

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

• I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
• Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
• Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)? 

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.

Edit: Sorry, I didn't realize there has been so much discussion on this already! I thought I had just stumbled across some obscure product haha. Anyway, I've been reading through discussions here, on Hacker News, Tim Ferris' blog etc. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not this is truly a "replacement for eating" (or whatever the term is). I think the more interesting question is whether it's a good idea to:

• Have Soylent once or twice a day.
• Have whole food snacks throughout the day like cheerios, trail mix, fruits etc.
• Have a nice big dinner each day.
• Maybe focus more on whole foods on weekends when you have more time.

My initial impression is that it is a good idea to use it as a once or twice a day thing.

1. It saves time. To me, this is huge.
2. It saves money.
3. It makes it easier to eat fewer calories, fat, sugar and salt. I'm surprised this health benefit isn't talked about more. Most american diets have way too much of these four things. I think Soylent helps in this area for two main reasons: a) It makes you full faster. b) It doesn't have as much calories/fat/sugar/salt as you a typical diet probably does.
4. It is probably way more nutritious than the meal it's replacing. Typical diets probably are lacking in certain nutrients, and Soylent will probably help to "fill in these gaps". Again, another huge benefit that I'm surprised doesn't get talked about as much (although this doesn't apply for people who use multivitamins).
5. There really don't seem to be anything unhealthy about having it once or twice a day. I'm not very confident about this claim because it hasn't been studied enough, but so far I haven't heard of anyone experiencing health problems from Soylent* as a once or twice a day thing, and meal replacement stuff like Soylent seems to have been around for a while and hasn't caused anyone any problems.
   *The two main problems (digestive issues and headaches) seem to be sufficiently addressed by 1. Adopting it slowly into your diet (over the course of 5 days or so) and 2. Making sure you get enough salt.

Original Post: you could ignore this if you're familiar with Soylent

I've just came across a meal replacement drink called Soylent - http://www.soylent.me/.

It is...

• Cheap (~$3/meal)
• Fast (just add water to the powder, no cooking or cleaning)
• I could work while I drink it (I'm a slow eater and don't like to work while I'm eating, so this would save me a lot of time)
• Nutritious
• Doesn't go bad for about 2 years

However I really don't have enough information to make any reasonably strong conclusions. Those bullet points above are more vague suspicions than evidence backed knowledge.

So do any of you guys know anything about Soylent or meal replacement drinks/bars/etc.? Are they healthy? Are there things I haven't accounted for?

Also, I'm sorta surprised this isn't more popular. Most people I know hate cooking and cleaning and shopping and spending so much time and money on food. I think most people would be more than happy to have Soylent (or something similar) for a meal or two each day, and then have a big dinner or something. It would save a ton of money and time, and would reduce the amount of fat and sugar in the persons diet. And because you're spending less money on food and consuming less fat and sugar, you could justify eating out or ordering in a splurge meal more often! What do you guys think? Why isn't this more popular? Are people really that afraid of the health effects?

(I'm not being hypocritical. I know that *I've* been asking about the health effects and seem to be worried about them, but I wouldn't think most people would approach this the same way I am. If I lived on an island isolated from other people, was told about Soylent and asked what I think it's popularity is, I would guess it to be very high. I would think people would see that it's pretty nutritious, aren't really any known risks or reason to think there would be risks, and be eager to save time and money by using Soylent).

It seems that politicians make a lot of decisions that aren't socially optimal because they want money from lobbyists and other campaign contributors. Presumably, the purpose this money serves is to keep them in office by allowing them to advertise a lot the next time they're up for reelection.

So the question then becomes, "why do they want to remain in office?". I could think of two reasons: money and power. From what I know, politicians have a pretty high salary (congressmen make ~$175k), so that's an understandable motivator. But power is the one I don't understand.

Supposedly they want to remain in office so they could use their power to have an influence. I don't know too much about politics, but it seems that politicians spend most of their time catering to lobbyists and voters rather than pushing the things they actually believe in. So much so that they aren't actually exerting that much power. And it seems that most of this catering is to special interests and is socially suboptimal. (I may very well be wrong on these points. I really don't know but it's the impression I get.)

Why are congressmen so motivated to stay in office, make $175k a year, exert a minimal amount of real power, and spend their time catering to lobbyists and making socially suboptimal decisions? I'm sure they could make twice as much in the private sector. I feel like there's something obvious that I'm missing here, but I'm genuinely confused.