All of Cipolla's Comments + Replies

Cipolla30

Yes, I have tried :) But I still value expert human intuition.

I think at least 50% of the doctors will go away in the future, as they are just trained to give the usual stuff, and if they disappear tomorrow an LLM would still give similar results (actually, even a monkey with just two basic medicines would be a good enough doctor).

Cipolla30

Not a proper quick take and perhaps off-topic on this forum. But given that I know some people here are into health I give it a shot.

I would be very grateful if someone could point me to some excellent doctors around Europe, website, or some sort of diet that can be good to improve my health.

I have been having some health issues:

  • getting sick frequently, feeling feverish most of the time
  • Difficulty breathing, with some pain sometime when I am also sick
    • It turns out I have recently developed asthma too. Initially a couple of doctors thought it was anxiety, and
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3Nathan Helm-Burger
Have you tried asking some LLMs (give lots of details about your life, even if they don't seem relevant to you. Use multiple LLMs for multiple opinions.), googling possibilities of disorders (use Google scholar to get academic papers), go back to the LLMs and add papers from one possible cause to the prompt. Repeat for each possible cause. LLMs have gotten better than an average doctor at medical diagnosis.
Cipolla30

There should be more talk about concentration of power, decoupling from the masses, and social fragmentation around here.

Disruptive technologies amplify the economic inequality gap within countries, and between countries.

  • New technologies, like automation or farming, quickly benefit a few number of people, basically the owners
    • As new technology emerges, the general population will see wage stagnation, job displacements, and will be able to get some benefit from the new technology only after a long time
  • New disruptive technologies tend to directly benefit fewe
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Cipolla10

Do you know why the error bars in the replication are smaller than the original one?  (just more people?) And with which confidence is the null hypothesis (difference = 0) is rejected in both cases?

Cipolla*83

I noticed the most successful people, in the sense of advancing their career and publishing papers, I meet at work have a certain belief in themselves. What is striking, no matter their age/career stage, it is like they are already taking certain their success and where to go in the future.

I also noticed this is something that people from non-working class backgrounds manage to do.

Second point. They are good at finishing projects and delivering results in time.

I noticed that this was somehow independent from how smart is someone.

While I am very good at sin... (read more)

1ZY
Could you maybe elaborate on "long term academic performance"?
3G Wood
Long term performance is a result of many skills / memes working together. I suspect you may have noticed that the children of white collar workers are more prepared for white collar work. It would make sense that they have inherited a set of memes that help with white collar work. Academic performance isn't the only thing, consider your fail conditions. There's lots of things out there to be good at. If you'd still like to keep going, I would say just keep practicing, I reckon it's taken me about four years to get good at my job. Look at what works and what doesn't for you. I found that tracking my time helped with focusing on one thing at a time, having a prioritized to do list helped me focus on the right thing, having a study group helped make learning fun, easy and consistent. Trying to fit all the knowledge I needed for a class on a single a4 sheet helped me memorize what I needed (something about the refining process). Otherwise get good sleep, lay off the substances, get some exercise in the sun and time with friends and family and you will be right as rain.
3lesswronguser123
Is this selection bias? I have had people who are overconfident and get nowhere. I don't think it's independent from smartness, a smart+conscientious person is likely to do better.
4Jonas Hallgren
Okay, so I would say that I atleast have some experience of going from being not that agentic to being more agentic and the stuff that I think worked the best for me was to generally think of my life as a system. This has been the focus of my life over the last 3 years. More specifically the process that has helped so far for me has been to: 1. Throw myself into high octane projects and see what I needed to keep up. 1. Burn out and realise, holy shit, how do these people do it? 1. (Environment is honestly really important, I've tried out a bunch of different working conditions and your motivation levels can wary drastically.) 2. Started looking into the reasons for why this might be that I can't do it and other can. 1. Went into absolutely optimising the shit out of my health by tracking stuff using bearable and listening to audiobooks and podcasts, Huberman is a house god of mine. 1. (Sleep is the most important here, crazy right?) 2. Supplement and technique tips for sleep: 1. Glycine, Ashwagandha, Magnesium Citrate 2. Use a sad lamp within 30 minutes of waking 3. Yoga Nidras for naps and for falling asleep faster. 3. Also checkout my biohackers in-depth guide on this at https://desmolysium.com/ 1. He's got a phd in medicine and is quite the experimental and smart person. (He tries a bunch of shit on himself and sees how it goes.) 2. Started going into my psychological background and talked to CBT therapists as well as meditating a lot. 1. I'm like 1.5k hours into this at this point and it has completely changed my life and my view of myself and what productivity means, e.t.c. 2. It has helped me realise that a lot of the behaviours that made me less productive where based on me being a sensitive person and having developed unhealthy coping mechanisms. 3. This lead to me having to relive through past traumas whilst having compassion and acceptance for myself.
2TeaTieAndHat
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this: * To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue  about "what they want to do with their lives" or similar super long-term goals. * In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way. * Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe? * And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said "it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain", when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they ca
Cipolla11

This statement would not apply here, because:

  • the post is about caring too much/only about something/someone we care about, and it does not imply about not caring/not favouring yourself
  • caring about your child has a priority on caring about you, hence the topic of the post

Indeed, I would argue that it is important to care about oneself, if you want to help others for example, or have a nice life (or for example if you want to get a promotion, etc...).

But when you care too much, and do not look into the big picture of your actions, bad things can happen. Simp... (read more)

Cipolla10

Hi @Viliam .

On

  2) Some people destroy value.

Isn't this true even in a work place where people are paid? While in such a case, the person might be fired, sometimes the damage is too big (and among the possibilities I am thinking about, it seems someone working has a higher chance of creating a black swan than someone not working (maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident)).

Anyway, if principle like the Pareto principle are true, we only need 20% of the working force to produce most of the goods. If you are talented, a UBI is a road to join that 20% :)

2Viliam
Yes, you can't completely eliminate the risk. But there is a huge difference between "an occasional disaster" and "a sad everyday reality". There are some families where for cultural reasons it is unthinkable to keep your individual finances separate, and it is heartbreaking to see how one member of the family is working their ass off to improve the situation, and some other member of the family just takes the extra money and burns it (not literally), keeping the family in poverty. And there is no way out, unless they learn to establish some boundaries. I like this argument! Never heard it before (applied to employment). I wonder where it applies, though. Probably true for most IT companies. But there are jobs that don't scale well, for example teachers or doctors. I guess if we fired the right 80% of teachers and replaced them with "kids watching Khan Academy", little educational value would be lost. (Though there is other value of schools: babysitting. That one probably scales worst of all.) Even better, kids watching Khan Academy most of the time, once in a week having a debate with a teacher. So... maybe we need about 50% of the current workforce? And with 50% of people staying at home, we would not need so much babysitting for the children. We would still need the doctors, I think. One day, machines may replace them, but we are not there yet. EDIT: Haha, just saw this at Astral Codex Ten:
Cipolla10

My model for the UN is

Basically, your model is: "UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them."

and my model for the (typical) UN interns

UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.


I guess when you say 

My model is: "Some ambitious people use the association with UN to achieve their own political goal.

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2Viliam
I have no idea whether organizations like UN can be made more effective or not. I don't want to claim dogmatically that they can't be, but I can't imagine a way they could. So if I wanted to achieve X, I would try to achieve it some way outside of UN, as if UN does not exist at all. Maybe someone who studies history of large organizations could tell us whether and how large organizations can be fixed. I don't have that kind of expertise. My assumption is that once organization is what it is, it gets filled mostly with people who are happy about the fact that it is what it is. Those people would resist a change. They could be overcome by a much stronger force from outside, but who exactly is this force compared to UN? Seems to me that the greatest threat to UN is that another organization will appear, doing the things that UN originally wanted to do, and as it becomes generally known, the resources will gradually be diverted from UN to the new organization. But that is a process that would take decades, so the people who are happy with UN being what it is can still assume to get decent salaries until they retire, no need to panic.
Cipolla30

ChristianKI, I will try to explain better the points you raised:

  • In this case, fantasy land ~ simple toy model. Obviously the world is way more complex, but this is how I approach many problems, starting from naive experiments. Then, you could argue that it would have been better to use a better toy model, something it would be interesting to explore.
  • Never assumed personal connections should not matter (I wrote: "that does not only..."). On the contrary, I think personal connections are important. E.g. academia, were you get jobs with reference letters. Thi
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Cipolla*82

As someone coming from a "poor" European immigrant family, I have always found it interesting that in the U.S. people with big cars can be considered poor.

These U.S. people, the "poor" Anoxan and I know that the abundance of something does not mean having the opportunity to live life. Ask King Midas.

An N-fold increase in selected productivity, like in the number of winter socks or the amount of gold you have, does not mean your life opportunities are going to drastically increase allowing you to gain momentum towards an escape velocity from your miserable ... (read more)

5Viliam
Sharing has the obvious advantages, but also a few costs. I am going to talk about the costs here -- that doesn't imply that people shouldn't share, just they they need to do that carefully. 1) Producing value requires effort. When you share, it means that other people can participate on the value. The question is, will they also participate on the effort? If the answer is "no", then we can get a situation where a few conscientious people work hard to produce value for everyone... but most people don't join their effort, because they relax and watch movies and debate online instead... so ultimately, people don't get much value anyway, because little is produced. The usual solutions require putting guns to people's heads to make them work; either literally (in communism) or metaphorically by refusing to share with those who don't produce (in capitalism). Is there a way to avoid this? Note that people have already tried - and failed - to achieve this. In communist countries there is a lot of propaganda around everyone all day long about how work is glorious, etc. And yet, even in the communist countries under 24/7 propaganda, most people avoid hard work if possible. (And "lazy vs hard work" is only a part of the problem. You also need people to become competent, because an incompetent hard-working person can generate a lot of damage. Learning to be good at something is just another kind of work that many people are happy to avoid.) 2) Some people destroy value. Well, in some sense everyone does -- by eating a piece of bread, you have destroyed it. Things are used by spending them. But some people, through incompetence or negligence (sometimes it hard to distinguish between these two) destroy a lot more value than others. Imagine someone so careless that no smartphone ever survives in their hands for a week; they will carelessly keep throwing or dropping it, the display will break. Imagine a society where people share everything with those who need it, includi