Congratulations on your success! A few questions that came to mind (I don't expect you to answer all of them):
Strong upvote. Success doesn't limit us. Success changes us. It is what we become that limits us.
Live free of attachment and you will always be free.
For me, I have found a microadjustment to your microadjustment helpful: Instead of drinking a whole cup of coffee, which causes unnecessary stress and heart racing for me, I only drink about 1/8th of a cup or even less at the same concentration. I have found that while this still has strong positive effects (more motivation, higher focus), it avoids most of the negative effects -- especially if it's taken in the morning.
Thank you for this post. The personal experience certainly seeps through in your recommendations (which is a good thing).
I would like to mention another area: nutrition. A good chunk of your productivity depends on how well you eat. It also affects how well your body can fight the chronic condition. It also gives you another variable to play around with (do I feel better if I eat carbs?).
However, I don't think it is as simple as "eat your veggies". People with chronic illness should have a solid understanding of the nutrients the body needs to function pro...
Do you visualize the icosahedron as one object or do you split it up and consider each separately, but reminding oneself that it is actually one object?
My answer to your visual thinking riddle is: breath in through your mouth and breath out through mouth + nostrils. But I can't decipher your anagram!
First of all, if you can solve it without visualization, I think that this is preferable, precisely because it is faster. There is no need to force oneself to visualize everything.
To visualize something, you need to create a map from the formal domain you are studying to visual transformations. In other words, you need to understand "what the formula" mean (or at least one way of looking at them). Do you know what it means visually to multiply one complex number to another? If you don't, you will be stuck doing calculations. If you do, then you can visuali
...Say you have two distinct points x and y. Consider all points whose distance to x is the same as to y. What can you say about the location of these points in terms of the line connecting x and y?
Try to solve any geometry puzzle with only your mind and you will be forced to do visual thinking.
I really appreciate you looking this up. Now it is clear that these claims are controversial.
Nevertheless, the question still is what learning ability refers to: Is it the ability to comprehend learning material that explains the topic well, or is it the ability to come up with the simple explanations yourself? It seems that the OP refers to the latter. The first kind probably has lower variation. Also, this means that when measuring learning ability, you should ensure that all involved people have access to the same "source". I would be interested in hearing the OP's thoughts on that.
I couldn't find it quickly, but I think that I read this on codehorror.
Probably this post; this claim has been highly controversial, with the original blog post citing a 2006 paper that was retracted in 2014, and whose original author wrote a meta-analysis that supported their conclusions in 2009. Here's some previous discussion (in 2012) on LW. Many people have comments to the effect of "bimodal scores are common in education" with relatively few people having citations to back that up, in a way that makes me suspect they're drawing from the original retracted paper.
In an experiment, a group of people who have never programmed before have been showed how to code. In the end, their skills were evaluated in a coding test. The expectation was that they would be roughly normally distributed. However, the outcome was that the students were clustered in two groups (within each of which you see the expected normal distribution). The students belonging to the first struggled while the second group fared relatively well. The researchers figured out the cause: the students that did better managed to create a mental model of wh
...Thank you for your kind comment. This is why I wrote this!
And the list is not exhaustive by any means. I really think this is a no-brainer.
My opinion is that, in almost all scenarios, if you have a question, you should always ask it. Why?
This takes on a higher level view of reading than I was intending to cover here. But nevertheless, this is a valuable resource. It reminds me of Adler's How to Read a Book.
Can you describe these heuristics and the type of content you used them on?
What is your definition of productive enterprise, what is non-productive enterprise?
How about this? The person uses his social security to buy a new phone. This purchase increases the capital available to the manufacturer for R&D of new phones.
I googled the broken windows fallacy and this is the argument I got: "If he hadn't paid for the broken windows, he could have gotten himself a pair of new shoes." But the point is that he didn't buy the pair of new shoes (he instead hoards the money), but he is forced to buy the new window (since it's windy otherwise), creating demand.
The idea behind the broken windows fallacy is that when you move money from point X to point Y, and start talking about the effects of having more money at point Y, it would be fair to also mention the effects of having less money at point X. Otherwise you are drawing a false picture.
To highlight the mistake you made, let's take the situation into extreme. Imagine that there are so many immigrants that the population literally doubles. Let's assume that all of them are the lazy type: none of them gets a job, ever, all of them are living on welfar...
It depends on how you look at it. In terms of productivity (output per labour cost), more robots is better. But if all cleaning staff is replaced by robots, the robot manufacturer profits while the displaced workers have less disposable income, thus there is less demand for the local economy (local groceries store, gas station, hairdresser, realor etc.), which suffers as a consequence.
First of all, I am not directly advocating immigration nor am I against it -- I am analyzing one particular aspect of it. A common reaction towards immigration is "they are robbing our jobs" and I tried to outline the faulty logic underneath that. They are not stealing anything, but becoming part of the economy.
Immigration is a complex issue that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If there are food shortages in a country, adding more people makes no sense. If there is, as you say, an excess of capital, but not enough people to invest it into, it d
...The vague reflections you are referring to are analogous to somebody saying "I should really exercise more" without ever doing it. I agree that the mere promise of reflection is useless.
But I do think that reflections about the vague topics are important and possible. Actively working through one's experiences, reading relevant books, discussing questions with intelligent people can lead to epiphanies (and eventually life choices), that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
However, this is not done with a push of a button and these things don't happen randomly
...Let me clarify. If a group decides that it wants X, this does not imply that the individual member of that group wants X. What they usually want is to avoid work and let other's do it or be told what to do. But if they agree upon the strategy "To achieve X, we agree that every member has to want X and, if he is capable, do X" (rather than "To achieve X, one leader tells everyone what to do"), then things would get done!
You claim that, in politics, rules with high cost of compliance are introduced to keep the fixed pool of resources from being divided between too many people. Is there an example of that? I think that this is mostly done not through laws, but through social affiliations. Those with the best connections get the job or the resources.
I like the idea of a do-ocracy. It's like saying "The only rule is that don't look for rules to do what needs doing". But the crux is that this seeming anti-rule is actually a rule that needs to be followed. I...
I feel that we are getting off-topic and I also think that I don't follow some of your thoughts.
The danger that you refer to may be laissez-faire capitalism and its effects on governments, societies and the environment. But this has nothing to do with the original post.
I think that you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The fact that there are problems with the current implementation of economics (aka globalization, multi-national cooperations, inequality etc.) does not preclude economic ideas, or ideas inspired by economics, having meri...
Thank you for the post and the analysis. I enjoyed this insight and I recall having the feeling that everything is a trade-off at least once. This explains it clearly and succinctly.
Maybe we should make a collection of solutions that did not make it, just to acknowledge their existence, like all sorting algorithms that are strictly worse than mergesort.
To explain where I am coming from: My primary goal was to make sense of a somewhat fragmented field by developing my own philosophy behind it and turning it into concepts that I can use as thinking tools to better understand the world. My goal is not to make academic progress in that field, but to extract the viewpoint it (in my opinion) offers and use it for my own purposes.
In particular, I noticed that we are prone to treat finite (and even scarce) resources as infinite, such as making overly long book lists that would take 2-3 lifetimes to complete read...
With regard to physics: You say at the end of your post that theories should stay inside their domain. I agree. But decision making and analysis of markets are not in the domain of physics, but economics.
Post-scarcity is an illusion. Even if we reach a very high level of development, there will still be scare resources left to distribute, such as time.
Maybe my post was unclear about it, but I am in favor of the time-efficient method of groceries shopping (provided one has enough income). It is definitely the better solution here, as you already pointed out...
Thanks for the kind words. I will do my best.
Ah, I see. So vectors are treated like abstract objects and representing them in a matrix-like form is an additional step. And instead of coordinate vectors, which may be confusing, you only work with matrices. I can imagine that this is a useful perspective when you work with many different bases. Thank you for sharing it.
Would you then agree to define where is the standard basis?
I agree that once a price has reached equilibrium, it is likely to stay there if the number of traders is large enough. But stability does not imply objectivity. It may be that this equilibrium is an overestimation, as often happens with technological hypes.
There is also no objective value of a stock that would allow us to separate traders into wise and unwise. Every trader is a human with certain experience, skills, investment strategy, available information, cognitive biases that he is unaware of. And the stock value merely represents the sum of all traders' characteristics.
If the king is too gullible, the vassals have an economic incentive to abuse this through the various methods you described. This eventually leads to a permanent distortion of the truth. If an economic crisis hits the country, his lack of truthful information would prevent him to solve it. The crises would exacerbate, which, at some point, would propel the population to rebel and topple him. As a replacement, a less gullible king would be put into power. This looks like a control loop to me -- one that gets rid of too gullible kings.
So, my strategy as dete
...Hi! I've known LW for quite a while, but only now decided to join. I remember reading a comment here and thinking "I like how this person thinks". Needless to say, this is not a common experience I have on the internet. What I hope to get from this site are fruitful intellectual discussions that trip me over and reveal the flaws in my reasoning :)
Your struggles with coordinate vectors sound familiar. I remember that, in the book I used, they introduced for a basis and called a coordinate vector of iff ( is left general on purpose). This explicit formulation as a simple bijective function cleared up the confusion for me. You can do neat things with it like turn an abstract map into a map from one basis to another: for linear .
But of course, from a practical standpoint, you don't think about vectors this way. As with proofs, once you heard a pl...
This reminds me of focused/diffuse thinking.
Focused thinking is rule-based, mechanical, goal-oriented, precise, strictly sequential, logical, works in small steps.
Diffuse thinking is creative, open-ended, creates long connections, produces leaps of insight that are impossible in focused thinking.
The best example of this is solving math problems. Paradoxically, it requires to alternate between these two modes frequently and fervently -- something that people generally struggle to do. After all, most people either think like bureaucrats (like me) or they thi... (read more)