Thanks for the answer, I think I formulated my original question incorrectly: why do you care about human suffering?

What about the way we treat others with whom we can't come to agreements? Is that a matter of morality? For example, consider young children. I suspect most people regard cruelty to a young child as a particular moral horror, precisely because the child cannot argue back or defend itself. Indeed, I would argue that our moral obligations are strongest to groups such as children.

are at least human

How does this make you care?

For people who prefer purses (I like them more stylistically, and also for the increased carrying capacity), I have found that using a smaller, more structured one with lots of pockets/compartments works well for solving this problem. Things I use often (like keys, cards, phone) are in specific easy to reach pockets, and I can easily find them and replace them by feel.

Load up tasks that can't be interrupted, or must be finished, as early in the day as reasonable. By the end of the day you want to only have things left to do that you can easily stop and leave when you should be heading to bed, to ensure you go to bed on time. Also try to avoid starting anything that will be exciting or stimulating too late in the day. For example, reading the latest HPMoR can be stopped at any time, but if you know you'll get into it and not want to stop reading, then don't start it until you have a sufficient block of time earlier in the day free.

What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)

Some things I have:

• the NATO phonetic alphabet

• mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon

• log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9

• The 68-95-99.7 rule

• Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's datetime.datetime.strptime function; the spellings of irrelevant and separate

I think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).

Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).

Was I alone in expecting something on recursive self improvement?

As we discovered on the London Google Group, I can talk at length about common pitfalls of group living, but a lot of that is based on experience rather than any kind of good theoretical understanding. Here are a few broad observations that stand out.

• Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it's relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.

• Arguments (especially ongoing ones) generally happen because of a disparity between what people agreed to and what people think is fair. Having all "official" household agreements written down somewhere with a set renegotiation date can help to offset this.

• Most disputes between otherwise-civilised people sharing living space are about cleanliness. Hiring a cleaner can eliminate a lot of resentment.

• Having a regular forum to discuss the household and air grievances-in-waiting works surprisingly well. Agreeing, for example, to convene on the first Monday of every month to talk about things that need doing, repairs, issues, expenses, upcoming visitors, etc.

• Organise money and payments to involve as few transactions as possible. How this is best accomplished will depend on the setup in question, but dividing up expenses between multiple parties can be a highly counterintuitive process. With multiple people paying multiple bills, you can wind up with accidental change-raising scenarios. You never want to be in the position of not knowing who any given debt or credit belongs to.

I think a running theme with these is that people often believe bonds of friendship are sufficient motivators to get everyone to cooperate well in a household. In reality, there are legitimate coordination and cooperation problems that upscale poorly, and instigating formal mechanisms for things can take the pressure off the social bonds. Some of my best domestic relationships were under mercenary convenience arrangements with relative strangers. When you don't have to worry about showing how great a friend you are, it's much easier to get along.

I'd assume that 3^^^3 people would prefer to have a barely noticeable dust speck in their eye momentarily over seeing me get tortured for 50 years & thus I'd choose the dust specks. If I'm wrong, that is fine, any of those 3^^^3 people can take me to court & sue me for "damages", of which there were none. Maybe appropriate reimbursement would be something like 1/3^^^3 of a cent per person?

I may not actually want to pay $1 per squirrel, but if I still want to want to, then that's as significant a part of my ethics as my desire to avoid being a wire-head, even though once I tried it I would almost certainly never want to stop.