All of ajc586's Comments + Replies

I personally don't find anything on the list disagreeable (including the summarization and mentoring items).

Summarization is a pretty well established memory consolidation technique to improve long-term recall of information. The OP does not explicitly state this is the aim, but that was my assumption, and if so I think it is uncontroversial that that is beneficial.

Regarding the mentoring, the item on the list was "you would have a good mentor" (which I agree with) and then underneath is "One way to do this is to email people" (which I also agree with in t... (read more)

I think that when you say "I love cats", you mean more than you prioritize specific cats. At some points, those cats will no longer be with you, and if you are like most cat lovers, likely you will then go on to own and prioritize different cats. So while the cats you prioritize at any moment in time may be specific, if you are like most cat owners, over the course of your life you will generally prioritize cats. ("I choose to eat cake every day above other desserts, but I don't in general love cake, just the cakes I eat on a given day" sounds like more li... (read more)

German Autobahns with no speed limit have been designed to be safely driven at high speed. For example, wide lanes, long straight sections, very large radius of curvature for non-straight sections, minimal layout changes, good drainage. And also features which minimise the impact if accidents do occur, e.g. strong central barriers.

It does not therefore follow that removing speed limits on typical American freeways, which have not been designed for high speeds, is a sensible thing to do.

Plus, the way US politics works, if you did any kind of no speed limit ... (read more)

Can you think of examples of mainstream use of the word 'love' for which prioritization isn't an essential component? It seems to me that prioritization is the key thing that binds together what would otherwise be disparate uses of the word, not just in the relationship context. (e.g. the 'love' in "I love reading" and "I love my wife" mean very different things, but are both effectively statements of prioritization)

While 'love' isn't of course well defined, it seems a central component for most usages is one of prioritisation (of time, money, emotional bandwidth etc.) in the face of constrained supply.

So in romantic love, priority of (usually) a single person is a necessary component. Loving a romantic partner is providing a guarantee to yourself that you will prioritize their needs over competing demands (which will therefore reduce in priority). Sex is often one of those needs, but not necessarily. It's the guarantee of priority that matters, not specifically what ... (read more)

I think one of the reasons why punitive damages sometimes make sense is in recognition of the fact that the total 'damage' (in the colloquial, not legal sense) can sometimes include not just an economic component, but a societal component beyond that.

Here's an example: suppose a company is concerned about wrongful death suits. There are basically two levers available here: (1) spend $X on making the work environment safer, (2) put $Y aside to cover the cost of such suits, and of course it's not either/or here. But although this didn't turn out to be the ca... (read more)

I don't think productivity ever increases with contiguous time spent on a given activity, at least in the short term. (Yes, longer term you can identify and implement working patterns that increase overall productivity.) All the effects push in the opposite direction: low hanging fruit gets picked first, you get tired, you get hungry, you've done all you can on your part of the critical path and need to wait for others to do their bit before you can continue, etc.

So I think there are two explanations here if someone on Hacker News does claim that the last ... (read more)

I like the idea of the 4-day work week, but this post is actually a quite separate argument.

The 4DWW idea is: work less, and you'll be happier as a direct consequence.

The argument in this post is: if you want to work X hours a week, whatever that X is, go for it! But rather than spending X on one job where you're almost certainly spending a significant proportion of X in the diminishing returns regime, split it into e.g. 0.8X on that job and 0.2X on a completely separate job. The main effect of this will be productivity gains, which in turn will lead to increased happiness as a side-effect.

Yes. I don’t think the argument requires that the work be hard (or that you work hard at it, whatever that really means). I believe it’s quite generally true that for most activities (howsoever achieved), productivity drops as hours spent increases. Then the rest of the argument follows.

Apologies for using ‘engineering speak’ without explaining. The transfer function relates the output of a process to its input. In this case the output is literally your total work output (y axis), and the input (x axis) is the time you spend producing that output.

The shape of this curve is well established, whereby initially the gradient is quite steep (that is, the first hours you spend doing a task, you get a lot done) but the gradient quickly starts to flatten.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, although I'm not sure quite of the approach. For starters, 'aligning humans' takes a long time and we may simply not have time to test any proposed alignment scheme on humans if we want to avoid AGI misalignment catastrophe. Not to mention ethical issues and so forth.

Society has been working on human alignment for a very long time, and we've settled on a dual approach: (1) training the model in particular ways (e.g. parenting, schooling etc.) and (2) a very complex, likely suboptimal system of 'checks and balances' to tr... (read more)

This article I think exemplifies why many people do not follow this advice. It's 39 pages long. I read it all, and enjoyed it, but most people I claim have a shorter attention span and would have either read half a page then stopped, or would have balked when they saw it was a 26-minute read and not read any of it. And those people are probably most in need of this kind of advice.

Language has a wonderful flexibility to trade off precision/verbosity against accessibility/conciseness. If you really want to rule out everything you don't mean, you inevitably n... (read more)

(Apologies if in writing this response I have missed your point.)

I don't believe that in most polyamorous relationships there are clear (i.e. fixed) priorities. I think most people will appreciate that priorities will change depending on the situation. The point I was trying to make was that this kind of 'emotional availability uncertainty' is specific to polyamorous relationships. Yes work can be a higher priority than the person in some relationships or at some times, but this is similar regardless of relationship type. The specific failure mode in polya... (read more)

A downside of polyamorous relationships not mentioned here is that it removes guarantees of availability, which for many is an important (the most important?) value component of a long-term relationship.

For example, consider a couple X and Y. Let's say X has a bad day at work. X knows that, when they get home, Y will be there to provide emotional support. This provides benefit for X in two ways - X knows that Y will be there for support later even while the bad day is playing out, and X additionally benefits from the actual support from Y once home. Y feel... (read more)

but is relaxing and having "fun" necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won't experiences like that speed up self-discovery?

I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there's an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. "having fun") for longer, because I view s... (read more)

The proportion of "deference to authority" is too high, in my opinion.

In school, or in the real world? And if the latter, what context in particular? In a career context, for example, lower deference to authority (when carefully executed) tends to lead to more rapid promotion, where at the terminus (CEO) everyone in an organisation defers to you. It doesn't seem there's a huge supply/demand imbalance for senior roles, which suggests to me that the self-assertiveness vs. deference balance in working-age society is more or less optimal.

what society cur

What were the principal factors that led to your decision that homeschooling and early graduation was 'better' for your kids then a 'conventional' schooling approach/timetable?

Clearly entering the workforce earlier leads to financial independence sooner, more years in employment hence greater lifetime wealth accumulation, etc. It's not clear that these things are that important either to individual well-being and happiness or in terms of one's place in broader society, so I'm interested in other kinds of reasons.

Full disclosure: I am 'a priori' against hom... (read more)

There's an inplicit assumption, both in the post and in many of the comments, that the 'value' of school for teenagers lies in knowledge acquisition. And therefore, if school is busywork a.k.a. does not lead to acquisition of useful knowledge, homeschooling or 'alternative' schooling must be better. I think this is wrong.

For society, the principal lasting value of schooling teenagers relates to the acquisition of skills like:

• dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority (both on an interpersonal level, and also on a societal level)
• prod