= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
$1,340.00
In response to
Money: The Unit of Caring
What does it mean if you have no units of money to spend? It seems rational to accept that, if I do not have enough money to pay for my own food, then society has deemed me too worthless to survive; and if I do not have enough money to spend on influencing the future, then society has deemed my desires not worth considering.
This is clearly true, but how is a human self supposed to survive that realization, and maintain the self-esteem necessary to go out and attempt to acquire money?
Have you ever tried writing software? Like they say: "a programmer is a machine that turns coffee into money," or something like that.
In response to
The Sin of Underconfidence
Can anyone give some examples of being underconfident, that happened as a result of overcorrecting for overconfidence?
I'll give it a shot.
In poker you want to put more money in the pot with strong hands, and less money with weaker ones. However, your hand is secret information, and raising too much "polarizes your range," giving your opponents the opportunity to outplay you. Finally, hands aren't guaranteed -- good hands can lose, and bad hands can win. So you need to bet big, but not too big, with your good hands.
So my buddy and I sit down at the table, and I get dealt a few strong hands in a row, but I raise too big with them -- I'm overconfident -- so I win a couple of small pots, and lose a big one. My buddy whispers to me, "dude...you're overplaying your hands..." Ten minutes later I get dealt another good hand, and I consider his advice, but now I bet too small, underconfident, and miss out on value.
Replace the conversation with an internal monologue, and this is something you see all the time at the poker table. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.
I use Cyberduck for FTP-ing. It's open source. I want it to have a global hotkey that will upload the file I'm working on, or have selected in the Finder, to the current directory so I don't have to drag every time.
I don't know anything about programming Macs, but here are some thoughts for anyone who wants to try this:
- DDHotkey can register global hotkeys.
- The current working file of a window is called the "represented file." You can get the path to it by calling representedFilename of the active NSWindow (I couldn't figure out how to get the active NSWindow). I didn't try to find out how to get the currently selected file in the Finder.
- Cyberduck is scriptable with AppleScript, I think. It has an "Upload" entry point. See here. It has a single required argument, the path of the file to upload. Wouldn't it be sweet if you could pass in the path from step #2, and everything just worked?
(Another option for step #3 would be to programmatically drag-drop the active file to the Cyberduck window, but I couldn't figure out how to do that)
In response to
What are you working on? August 2012
Dating. Progress from June, February, December, October.
A year into my experiment, I'm glad to finally report some success: I asked a girl out and she said yes and we had a very nice time together ending in my first real sexual intimacy. I tried to see her again, and she was enthusiastic about the prospect for a week or so, but things cooled after that. I think she moved on.
For a long time before this I had to seriously consider some scary hypotheses about myself, many along the lines of "you are so X that you'll never Y." I've updated all of those downward. But as far as the actual date went, I don't think my changes of the last two months had much to do with it. In the honesty of calm retrospection, no theory fits as well as "we both wanted to," i.e. "I got lucky," i.e. I don't actually know exactly what works and what doesn't, yet.
However
A year ago, I wouldn't even have been in a position to have this kind of good fortune. And even if, say, half the effort was hers, well, the other half came from somewhere, along with a bunch of nontrivial skills that took practice & research & reflection to build. I could name a dozen ways that the night would have sucked if it happened to wmorgan_2010. But it was actually awesome, and while I can already feel myself climbing back on the hedonic treadmill, for now I'm very very happy to have finally completed level three. Next subgoal is to do it again.
In response to
Admissions Essay Help?
The article you linked talks a little bit about modeling admissions officers. One nonobvious thing to consider:
There's a very good chance that the only person who will ever read your college essay is 25 years old.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/05/how_to_write_a_college_applica.html
Some unsolicited advice: private universities are way overpriced right now, and 17- & 18-year-olds are regularly encouraged to take on massive nondischargable debt in a way that many consider exploitive. Stanford's tuition broke $40K this year...have a plan, is all.
In response to
What Is Signaling, Really?
Be warned! Signaling that you understand signaling is a terrible signal, because it throws all your other signals into doubt. Revealing that you are optimizing your signaling separately (for example, talking about "PUA") is among the worst signals of all.
What you're saying rings true, and a lot of people agree with you, but is it actually right? Is it testable? I can think of plenty of counterexamples, by people who look like they know they're doing. But I can't think of anyone whom I just want to grab and yell at: "you'd be so effective if you'd just shut up about the signaling already!"
In response to
Morality open thread
I have a question: what is akrasia exactly?
Say I have to finish a paper, but I also enjoy wasting time on the internet. All things considered, I decide it would be better for me to finish the paper than for me to waste time on the internet. And yet I waste time on the internet. What's going on there? It can't just be a reflex or a tick: my reflexes aren't that sophisticated. Given how complicated wasting time on the internet is, and that I decidedly enjoy it, it looks like an intentional action, something which is the result of my reasoning. Yet I reasoned that I shouldn't go on the internet, so it can't really be an intentional action. My intention was exactly not to go on the internet.
Maybe I'm just being hypocritical, and I actually value the internet more than finishing a paper?
Don't sell your reflexes short. Our brains were executing complicated plans for millions of generations before acquiring explicit reasoning, i.e. language. Lately I've been leaning towards the Elephant and Rider model of decision-making, or drawing from this pithy tweet by Stephen Kaas. In your case, I think, your elephant wants to surf the web, and it has a lot more brainpower than your goal-setting rider who wants to finish the paper.
In a practical sense, I think this means you want to put yourself in situations where success is the default, expected result. Use your conscious mind to set up the system, once, then the full power of your brain will work towards your goal, rather than have your "seek cheap entertainment" drive fighting your "finish my paper" drive. (Easier said than done!)
Paul Graham has two computers, one online and the other disconnected from the Internet, and his rule is "you can waste as much time as you want, as long as it's on the other computer". That works for him. Scott Adams' rule is "go to the gym five times a week" even if that means walking through the doors and then walking out immediately. He says, "losers have goals and winners have systems."
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Always negotiate on salary, i.e. ask for more than their initial offer. Patrick McKenzie explains why.