All of curiousepic's Comments + Replies

I'd still be interested in seeing this.

Has the checklist been revisited or optimized in any way since its original formulation? (By CFAR or otherwise?)

Also the books of Karl Schroeder (Sun of Suns series, other standalones)

Sounds interesting - would love a writeup of any solid conclusions.

A bit late here, but Golden Age by John C. Wright.

I decided to take this. Let me know if you'd like to connect.

I'm an EA and interested in signing up for cryonics. After cryocrastinating for a few years (ok I guess I don't get to say "after" until I actually sign up), I've realized that I should definitely sign up for life insurance, because of the ability to change the beneficiary. I place a low probability on cryonics working right now, but I can claim a charity or a Donor Advised Fund as the beneficiary until I place a sufficient probability on suspension technology working. In the future, I can change it back if I change my mind, etc.

Any issues tha... (read more)

0Alsadius
I sell life insurance as a big part of my day job, and you should be aware that buying a big life insurance policy for charity is the sort of thing life insurance underwriters tend to be a touch suspicious of. It can be done, but they'll ask for things like your donation history to that charity and why you suddenly feel the need to shower hundreds of thousands of dollars upon them. Insurance applications can be turned down for financial reasons too, not just medical.
0Nisan
It might be worth looking into which life insurance companies are friendly to cryonics.
0philh
Presumably, it would be more efficient to donate the cost of life insurance directly to the beneficiary. People often fund cryonics with insurance because they can't afford it otherwise, but if you could pay upfront without significantly damaging your quality of life, I'd expect that to be a good idea too.
4kevin_p
The main flaw I can think of is that insurance is a money-loser on average - otherwise the people selling it wouldn't make any money, so they wouldn't offer it at that price. I can't immediately find average ratios for life insurance, but typical payouts for medical insurance are 80% of premiums while the figure for property insurance is more like 50%. In other words, the expected net cost of taking out the insurance policy, if you never decide to redirect it to cryonics or loved ones, is going to be somewhere between 20% and 50% of the premiums. Is that worth it for the extra flexibility it gives you? That's something only you can decide.
0Username
Well it still costs money, so it will be a constant drain on resources as long as you have life insurance. Which I suppose is fine if the payoff to the charity is worth it as a terminal goal, but I personally feel very weird betting on my own death. (At least in the absence of children or other dependents).

The value was mostly due to hearing others' opinions and perception of me, where you don't usually get that kind of feedback. The assessment really only provided the framework and context.

While I didn't really utilize them myself, I'd agree with those benefits.

I took StrengthsFinder 2.0 soon after a new manager was hired for my office. I was skeptical of it, but not negative. The Strengths it gave me were unsurprising. The most use I got out of the exercise was from insights gleaned from a roundtable discussion about these strengths from the outside view of coworkers who had known me for a few months to more than a year.

0iarwain1
Were your colleagues able to understand you better because of the assessment, or was it just the fact that you were discussing each others' strengths the important part and it had little to do with the assessment per se? When I took the assessments I too found that it didn't tell me all that much about myself that I didn't already know. But it did help me in three ways: 1) I was able to express myself better and more precisely when talking about my strengths with others. 2) It turned vague notions in my head into more precise formulations that I could think about more constructively on my own. 3) Perhaps the most useful part was getting other people to take the test and then discussing their strengths with them. That was a real eye-opener. In many cases I simply could not imagine that someone else could view things so differently than me. So for me the assessment functioned as a terrific antidote to the Typical Mind Fallacy.

Is it worth it to carry around aspirin to take if you even worry you might be having a heart attack, for people under 45?

0[anonymous]
I'm not a doctor, but my understanding is that aspirin won't do anything for a heart attack once it starts -- the possible benefits are prophylactic, not curative, and come from low doses over time.
1RomeoStevens
carrying a small first aid kit in your day bag is pretty reasonable.
-4Lumifer
If you worry about having a heart attack, there are better things than aspirin to carry with you.

Now that it's in Main, I'm wondering why it hasn't yet been promoted? The current situation is low-visibility, given LW reading trends.

Her was superb. If you have seen it already, here's an interesting perspective on the film.

-1Shmi
Hah,

Is there any more information beyond mentions like this?

How long have you been doing this, and have you noticed any effects?

1sakranut
For about a month and a half, though I forget about 25% of the time. I haven't noticed any strong effects, though I feel as if I approach the day-to-day more conscientiously and often get more out of my time.

Is there a time on Sunday in mind for the EA presentation? I'd love to be there for it but our flight out is 8:15 PM.

0Raemon
There is not a specific time in mind, but I think there'll be 3-4 presentations or guided discussions, starting at 3:00, and I do want it to be only the earlier side. (I'm not sure if the EA presentation will be more presentation-like or guided-discussion-like)

I added so many dailies that I basically found the overhead of updating HRPG ate into the productive energy needed to complete the dailies, and ended up in a death cycle. I then decided to use it explicitly only for tasks at work, and have been keeping up with it ever since, but I do miss the sweet spot of personal life productivity that I hit before that crash.

The willpower group, and terminal value exercise sound very interesting - Please share notes or write up articles about these (or if the stream ends up working, please share a link to the record)!

0Slava Matyukhin
Willpower group is our long-running project, coming to an end soon. People were working through Kelly McGonigal's "Willpower Instinct", one chapter per week. I guess I should write up about it. Don't know much about terminal values exercise yet. I'll let its maker know that you're interested. We all speak Russian, so the stream isn't going to be useful to the general lesswrong.com community, unfortunately.

I read a couple of these last night (I've read others long ago), not particularly scary ones - 427 and 682... and then dreamt I read more, including one that did have a "shocker" animation (after which I remember cursing you for suggesting they were rare!), and then one with a high-res gif/video of a complex artifact I can remember the vague form of - somewhat like a grey bowling-pin with brightly colored shapes rotating along its axis - abstract, but almost clownish and mundane, but still creeped me out in-dream far more than any actual article.

I did have more vivid and "weirder" dreams, especially in the morning (perhaps memory bias), and a handful of them were quite disturbing, far from my norm. But, this lessened after a couple of weeks of off and on use.

1hyporational
I've had melatonin quite a while and still have far weirder dreams than before starting. Last night, I dreamt of having a generalized epileptic seizure while conscious. Luckily I can shrug nightmares off easily these days.
1Nectanebo
This was also my experience.

I would like to hear rebuttals of this reasoning, since it is a big contributor to my current cryocrastination and choice-stress.

The other big contributor is the article (written by Rudi himself) which insists that the cost of the procedure will increase significantly in our lifetimes and thus encourages you to fund your insurance as much as possible, rather just up to the current coverage costs.

4TheOtherDave
It's not a rebuttal, exactly, but mostly this seems like haggling over the price. If you believe that signing up for cryonics makes sense at 50, then presumably you believe that your probability (Pd50) of dying that year in a cryopreservable way (e.g., in a hospital, not in an accident, whatever), your probability (Pv) of being revived post-mortem if you die in a cryopreservable way, and your estimate of the value (V) of being revived post-mortem are such that (V Pv Pd50) is greater than the differential cost of signing up at 50 vs 51. It seems clear that Pd50 is higher than Pd20. All this business about accidents aside, you're simply less likely to die at 20 than you are at 50. Call that factor X. You can look up actuarial tables to get a sense of it; it's probably smaller than 1000. You can also look up what you pay for your first year of coverage if you sign up at 20, vs 50. Call that difference Y. So, the question is, is your estimate of (Pv V X) higher than Y? If so, then it seems that the value of signing up for a year of coverage at 20 is worth the cost. If not, then it isn't. I find the idea of being confident of this equation at 50 but not at 20 to be outright bizarre... it seems to me that the vast uncertainty inherent in estimating V and Pv is such that if I'm confident cryonics is a good bet at 50, a few orders of magnitude one way or the other ought not significantly alter my confidence.

Why? It seems obvious to me that the first recovered bodies will be those that were frozen shortly before the recovery procedure was available, with the best freezing procedure at that time.

It seems to be pretty well decided that (as opposed to directly promoting Less Wrong, or Rationality in general), spreading HPMoR is a generally good idea. What are the best ways to go about this, and has anyone undertaken a serious effort?

I came to the conclusion, after considering creating some flyers to post around our meetup's usual haunts, that online advocacy would be much more efficient and cost effective. Then, after thinking that promotion on large sites with high signal to noise is mostly useless, realized that sharing among smaller communiti... (read more)

0Scott Garrabrant
Convince me of this claim that you think is well decided. I am not convinced that from the viewpoint of a non-rationalist that HPMoR doesn't have many of the same problems as Spock. I can see many people reading the book, feeling that HP is too "evil," and deciding that "rationality" is not for them. Also, EY said "Authors of unfinished stories cannot defend themselves in the possible worlds where your accusation is unfair." This should swing both ways. If it turns out that HP goes crazy because he was being meta and talking to himself too much, then spreading HPMoR is probably not as good an idea.

When it comes to typical online forums signatures are a good way to promote things. Take a quote of HPMOR and attach a link to it.

Similarly, to remind myself to do stuff with an object, I put that object where I will find it when I prepare to go out.

If my hamper is full, but am going to bed or leaving for work, I just put the hamper in front of my door so I will remember to do it immediately when I get home.

I also put stuff I need to take with me next time I leave the house on top of my wallet (or my shoes, or hanging from my doorknob, depending on size).

Has anyone created anything like a flyer or advertisement (or even a simple Pitch) for HPMoR, optimized for increasing visits to the website?

As someone pointed out to me when mentioning this to them, to be a candidate for Great Filter there would need to be something intrinsic about how planets are formed that cause these two types of environments to be mutually exclusive, else it seems like there isn't sufficient reduction in probability of their availability. Is this actually the case? Perhaps user:CellBioGuy can elucidate.

3[anonymous]
Well it took a while for that summoning to actually take effect. The point I was making that that is not necessarily a strong contender (as in many orders of magnitude) because of two things. One, all stars slowly increase in brightness as they age after settling down into their main sequence phase and their habitable zones thus sweep through the inner system over time (though this effect is much stronger for larger stars because they age and change faster). Secondly, its probable that most young smaller planets tend to have much more in the way of atmospheres than later in their lives just due to the fact that they are more geologically active then and haven't had time for the light molecules to be blasted away. And if terrestrial planets follow any sort of a power rule in their distribution of masses, there should be multiple Mars-size planets for every Earth sized planet. At this point I would say that any speculation on the exact place and time of the origin of life is premature, that there's nothing to suggest that it didn't happen on Earth, but that there is little to suggest that it couldn't have happened elsewhere within our own solar system either even if we have little reason to think it had to (besides adding the necessity that it later moved to the very clement surface of the Earth, the only place in the solar system that can support a big high-bimoass biosphere like ours). I honestly don't know much about the proposed molybdenum connection. Some cursory looking about the internet suggests that molybdenum is necessary for efficient fixation of nitrogen from the air into organic molecules by nitrogenase, the enzyme that does most of that biological activity on Earth. I would be surprised though if that were the only way it could go, rather than just the way it went here... EDIT: upon further looking around, I am worried that the proposed molybdenum connection could be correlation rather than causation. Most sources claiming that the presence of lots o

I fixed this by simply carrying nail clippers around on my keys, and remembering to use them instead of ripping them apart with my teeth. A few weeks of that and they were in good enough shape that I didn't feel the need to bite them.

This post may turn into a decent resource.

This is totally worth a discussion post.

I have had some success with this by reading a few lines of a physical book. Interesting poetry (I had EUNOIA by Christian Bok handy) is better suited to this, as you can complete an entire passage or page in this short span.

It's similar to checking news or Facebook, but much less likely to suck you in.

Contra is an emergent, tesellated, permutating turbine generator of Hedons, Flow, and Awesome, of which you are a self-aware component.

There are few things I would recommend more highly for a human, especially for people who don't "get" dance (like myself 4 months ago). This is because you follow very simple instructions, you do not need to think about what you're doing with your feet at all, and the people are incredibly welcoming. It's great for social comfort zone expansion - virtually no one will turn you down if you ask to dance, unless th... (read more)

2Zaine
Is the link representative of all Contra dancing?

Being in a position to soon either look into joining, or to start a rationalist group house, I and other potential housemates would very much appreciate a post on how to go about doing either (beyond Shannon's somewhat minimal post), and/or a post where individuals who have already done so could talk about their experiences, their benefits and pitfalls, etc.

0curiousepic
This post may turn into a decent resource.

I'd be interested in lukeprog's (or CFAR's) thoughts on how to implement "tight feedback loops" into every day instrumental rationality (as opposed to running a business or project).

7apophenia
I'd be interested in writing this one. I don't your divide is a real one; it's basically the same skill. But it's still worth talking about in that context.

Sleep Cycle helped this for me for about a year. I've noticed the effect lessen over the past few months (feeling crappier upon waking than I used to) - but I'm hoping it has something to do with the temperature/season.

2A1987dM
Yeah, I was going to mention something about that; now that you remind me... Insomnia may (or may nor) be solved by one or more of: (roughly in order of perceived-by-me importance) making sure the temperature in your room is not too high (or too low), using LeechBlock or something to prevent you from surfing the Web past a certain time, not spending too much time in your room (especially in bed) doing things other than resting (or intimate activities), biphasic sleep (I usually sleep around six hours and a half every night and take a one-hour nap in the afternoon), lots of light/water/caffeine until dinner but very little afterwards, and software that decreases the colour temperature of your display (such as F.lux or Redshift). (I still wonder how could I spend the first two decades of my life having serious trouble falling asleep pretty much all summer nights but seldom in the winter, before it occurred to me that keeping the windows open for a couple hours after sunset to let cooler air in might solve most of the problem.)

Agreed in retrospect. Scope creep creeped up on me.

Good information here that might be "hidden" due to the cute article title. Consider adding a descriptive subtitle, or posting the exercises as their own article.

1Yuu
Thank you, I think current title will suffice.

I have quickly edited the title. Yuu, feel free to choose something better!

5Larks
Yup; I thought the article was spam from the title, but the content is good and does not deserve such an impression.

A "Don't Break the Chain" feature would be nice, to rack up consecutive pomodoros.

Pornodoros might actually be particularly effective for some.

If there will be effort put into actually building something, we might want to look into what other purposes it could serve, such as virtual (persistent?) meetups, remote CFAR sessions, etc. with features such as a "talking totem" that can be passed to enable audio from that person.

(Split from a previous comment for concept independence)

Later. Keep the project requirements small until it's working well. Get it to serve one desired purpose very well. Only then look at extending its use.

This is true for any coding project, but an order-of-magnitude more true for a volunteer project. If you want to get a programmer to actually volunteer for a project, convince them that the project will see great rewards while it's still small. In fact, you basically want to maximize intuitive value, while minimizing expected work. It feels so much better when your actual, original goal is achieved with a small amount of work than it feels when your tiny, first step is only the start of achieving your goal.

Try editing the article, selecting all and cutting the text, then using ctrl-shift-V to paste without formatting (my new favorite thing). Hopefully it will use the default text size.

3Kawoomba
That's the joke.
6DaFranker
Muphry's Law is indomitable.

Some other Study Hall nice-to-haves:

  • A way to "buzz" people who you notice slacking, producing a non-mute-able sound on their end (with a cooldown timer).
  • I'd like a way to post easily visible rules to enforce on myself ("Buzz me only if you can see me at my computer an I appear to be websurfing - lesswrong.com is OK").
  • It seems to me that having overlapping "shifts" of people on/off a pomodoro would be nice - such that those on break could keep an eye on those working, and buzz them if they're slacking.
  • It would be very nice
... (read more)
2Tenoke
There is abuse potential as mentioned earlier. Pointing out in chat that someone is procrastinating should be beneficial enough through social pressure in this setting and it does not have any obvious drawbacks like non-mutable sounds do. It defeats the purpose to some extent - the idea is that all of you work at the same time and rest at the same time. In addition breaks only account for 1/6th of the total time. Full screen sharing has more benefits than this and requires less/no further work. Kicking for inactivity might provide a purpose but I am not sure if this is the best way to do it.
0[anonymous]
* A way to "buzz" people who you notice slacking, producing a non-mute-able sound on their end (with a cooldown timer).

Seed: A Game of Theories.
Have at it.

1simplicio
When you play the game of theories, you win one grad student at a time, or you lose one funeral at a time.

Yes, in fact, weekly contra dancing is starting to replace my previous exercise routine!

Some previously posted boring advice about maintaining an exercise routine:

I was successful in keeping a strict (but light) exercise routine for a year. Here are the main things I think helped me form the habit:

  • Not worrying about quantifying, or optimizing. I would immediately get into the rabbit hole of analysis, when I knew that any exercise was much better than procrastinating until I found the perfect method. Once the habit is formed, then you can optimize it.
  • Reduce physical inconveniences to actually exercising. The thought of going to a gym immed
... (read more)
[anonymous]100
  • Find a physical activity that you enjoy.

Once the habit is formed, then you can optimize it.

I think this is really important and not mentioned enough.

3OrphanWilde
Find what works; if something doesn't work, find something else that does. If it stops working, immediately start looking for something else in turn. I don't exercise at home because it's too easy to rationalize that I'll do it in five minutes, and never actually do it. Whereas if I go to the gym every day on my lunch hour, there's little room for procrastination.

Some time after restricting my diet to paleo/keto, necessitating an increase in vegetables, I realized I had a sense that the act of eating a vegetable was somehow "virtuous". I noticed this and filed it as a rationalization, but an instrumentally useful one.

I visited the SENS lab in Mountain View in April of last year and was disappointed when no one I spoke to (Aubrey was absent, being his birthday of all coincidences) had heard of Givewell. So glad to see potential progress on them being considered.

But Holden's overview of the biomedical charity landscape is also concerning; perhaps one with the goal of defeating aging should in fact be focusing funds on closing the Valley of Death and/or reforming the drug approval process?

I just realized that "MIRI" is (perhaps intentionally) evocative of the word "mirror", which is all kinds of suitable.

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