That all makes sense. Work productivity and trivial inconveniences are important. At first I was thinking that 20-30 minutes to set up a work area is comparable to a commute and not too big a deal, but then I remembered that a) commutes suck and b) the raw number of minutes is only part of the story.
Kitchen space is the most important thing for me in terms of wanting space. I get a little overwhelmed when I'm cooking and things are tight. But this can be mitigated by focusing on a) meals that don't require as much space and b) when I do want to cook a meal that requires more space, just take my time and go slow.
A few years out of college I ended up living in a 200 square foot micro-apartment. And my girlfriend lived with me there part-time. There were definitely things about it that aren't ideal, but ultimately it was pretty tolerable.
I think a big reason why I don't mind smaller spaces too much is because I don't mind utilizing space outside of my apartment: communal areas in the apartment complex, coffee shops, libraries, parks. Not everyone's like that though. Some people kinda need the privacy and comfort of home to relax.
That's all cool to hear!
But I got used to that once it really sank in that unless I'm really in the middle of nowhere, I can get almost anything I actually need almost immediately, and almost anything else within a few days.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. A similar thought has occurred to me. I used to drive from Vegas to Mexico with my girlfriend for dental work. I remember passing through areas that felt incredibly remote, but even the most remote areas were never really more than an hour or so away from a Walmart or something. I think it'd take some actual effort to find a place that is truly remote.
The mental overhead was a big deal for me. For example, I'd wanted to get a new job for quite a few years, but felt weighed down like I had no time or energy to look; once we hit the road I was able to actually spend time and thought on this, and got a new job within a few months.
I'm glad to hear it! I'm in the same ballpark. I wonder how common this sort of thing is.
I feel like it's something that many people should at least experiment with though. I suspect that a lot of people would predict the mental overhead to be a big deal but after trying they'd find that it was actually a big deal. I also suspect that this mental overhead affects people in ways that are hard to notice. Like maybe it leads to procrastination or something.
I will say that there is a lot of value in having dedicated spaces for specific activities that you actually do often, rather than having to constantly convert a multi-use space into different modes. That adds up in the same way having a commute adds up, vs working from home.
I'm not sure what I think about the value of spaciousness. I'd love to hear about any specific examples you have in mind.
Having less stuff also means being able to spend more per item where it matters to you, in order to get higher quality.
Ah yeah, that's a good point!
My main concern with heavy LLM usage is what Paul Graham discusses in Writes and Write-Nots. His argument is basically that writing is thinking and that if you use LLM's to do your writing for you, well, your ability to think will erode.
I'm similar, for both smart phones and LLM usage.
For smart phones there was one argument that moved me a moderate amount. I'm a web developer and startup founder. I was talking to my cousin's boyfriend who is also in tech. He made the argument to me that if I don't actively use smart phones I won't be able to empathize as much with smart phone users, which is important because to a meaningful extent, that's who I'm building for.
I didn't think the empathy point was as strong as my cousin's boyfriend thought it was. Like, he seemed to think it was pretty essential and that if I don't use smart phones I just wouldn't be able to develop enough empathy to build a good product. I, on the other hand, saw it as something "useful" but not "essential". Looking back, I think I'd downgrade it to something like "a little useful" instead of "useful".
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, exactly. Just kinda reflecting and thinking out loud.
Suppose that you are having a disagreement with someone and you are frustrated and angry with them. It seems likely that this frustration would meaningfully harm your ability to reason well.
If so, similar to what we do in response to cognitive biases, it seems appropriate to make some adjustments. For example, given susceptibility to the planning fallacy, supposing we originally assume it'll take 20 minutes to get to the airport, we might adjust this towards a more pessimistic estimate of 45 minutes. I would think that it'd make sense to do something similar in response to noticing a feeling of frustration in yourself during a disagreement with someone.
I've seen surprisingly little discussion of this idea.
This is such a good post. From The Scout Mindset (emphasis mine):
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn't the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn't automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn't help you unless you're willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that's since been corroborated by researchers, as we'll see in this book: our judgment isn't limited by knowledge nearly as much as it's limited by attitude.
If judgement is mostly limited by mindset rather than knowledge, then it is important to find ways to improve your mindset. There are slower but more persistent ways of improving your mindset, and there are quicker but temporary "boosts" that you can utilize. I think The Ritual speaks to one of these "boosts".
But reciting meta-mnemonics and staring and blank walls is only one way that you might give yourself such a boost. I think it is worthwhile and important to think about others.
Yesterday I took a 50 mile bike ride and noticed myself feeling like I'm in a much better state to change my mind about something important. I felt like it gave me a boost. Perhaps long distance cardio really does provide such a boost, especially when done in nature.
That's an excellent thought experiment!
Piggybacking off of it, suppose the man is struggling in life and otherwise doesn't get any exercise. Suppose that Sunday morning digging really improves his health and quality of life a lot. Is the activity justified?
How about if he's depressed? What if he isn't digging by himself but is instead digging with a tight nit community of other gold believers? The digging provides him with feelings of warmth and connection that make life worth living. Is it justified then?
Where I'm coming from is that, supposing we view truth as an end in-and-of-itself, I want to question how much weight we give to truth relative to other ends we are interested in. I think that regardless of whether you are a consequentialist or virtue ethicist or deontologist or whatever, non-naive versions of these philosophies will weigh different considerations against one another.[1]
And so I don't think OP's position here indicates that he assigns a low value to truth. I moreso suspect that he is weighing truth against other important considerations and feels that the calculus comes out in favor of sacrificing some truth in favor of other important things.
Thanks to Gordon for helping me understand this in this dialogue!
My thesis is that most people, including the overwhelmingly atheist and non-religious rationalist crowd, would be better off if they actively participated in an organized religion.
My argument is roughly that religions uniquely provide a source of meaning, community, and life guidance not available elsewhere, and to the extent anything that doesn't consider itself a religion provides these, it's because it's imitating the package of things that makes something a religion.
I would have liked to see the post focus more on the second paragraph. I feel like the post very minimally focused on it and instead, the majority of the post was on related topics like which religion one should choose.
I think this is also promising as a way of coordinating online video chats.
I don't disagree with that people derive some pleasure from stuff, including stuff they use only rarely. Part of my position is that the magnitude of pleasure here is relatively low. I'm not sure whether or not you agree with that. It's also hard to operationalize.
But the more central part of my position is that since housing is expensive, you have to pay a relatively high price to have enough room for this sort of stuff, and the amount of pleasure it generates is a good amount lower than this price. Do you disagree with that?