All of Pimgd's Comments + Replies

If UBI were being offered across the US, I would expect them to rise by the amount of UBI. 

For subsidies per purchase, maybe. 

But not for subsidies per human.

Imagine some prefab tiny house off the grid somewhere in a food desert. I don't think its rent will go up by the UBI amount.

Also, there are houses that house two people (or more!). If there's limited supply in comparison to the demand, I'd expect that the costs of those might go up by more than UBI (because there's two people's worth of UBI as extra budget available).

So I find it interesting that God, in the story above, rejected this throne. Unlike us, he had the option of full control, and a perfectly aligned world. But he chose something different. He left pure self behind, and chose instead to create Otherness—and with it, the possibility (and reality) of evil, sin, rebellion, and all the rest.

I see reasoning or rationalizing from fictional evidence here. You're looking at a story created by some human to serve some purpose (my guess: some vague gesturing at religion & answering the question of why-can-there-be... (read more)

That's fair, and I have a workaround now with nitter.

For now, URL rewriting seems to do the trick: replacing twitter.com with nitter.net allows me to view. It's slow, though, and I have no idea whether nitter is safe or whether it will be able to handle the traffic.

Twitter no longer allows accessing tweets without logging in. If it's not too much effort, can you include the text of a tweet (like you've already done for some)? Twitter links are now effectively dead for me.

2Zvi
I make a judgment call on what most people would want or not want. Almost no one clicks the links anyway, and long post is always long.
1Pimgd
For now, URL rewriting seems to do the trick: replacing twitter.com with nitter.net allows me to view. It's slow, though, and I have no idea whether nitter is safe or whether it will be able to handle the traffic.

Duplicate IDs are hard to come by. However, you might be able to have multiple different forms of ID (such as an ID card and a passport).

1[anonymous]
And when you travel, duplicate debit cards!  I just opened a second free checking account at my bank to do this.  Keep one in your carry-on/hotel room, and one when you go out on excursions.  So if you get pick pocketed or the ATM refuses to return your card, you have a spare. This also lets you use cash for all your transactions - so the only way you can be skimmed is at the ATM, nowhere else.
5benjaminikuta
Backup citizenship! There were some posts about it here I think. 

Shoes might be the one item that you can't do this for, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Pre-covid, I bought a pair of shoes. But I am averse to throwing items away before they are properly "dead" (or until they really require effort), so shoes that still have some soles on them (and fit comfortably rather than the tight fit of new shoes) would still be used.

Because there were lockdowns and the like, I wore my shoes a lot less. I went out a lot less. My grocery store is rather close to my house. The new shoes spent two years in their shoe box.

Lockdowns were lifte... (read more)

4mingyuan
I have seen this happen with one pair of shoes; not sure of the material but they disintegrated while being worn for the first time out of lockdown. But I've successfully stored (or seen stored) lots and lots of other pairs of shoes where the material has held up fine, including leather, cloth, suede, and rubber.

So the fact that Alice can't be viewed as having any coherent relative value for apples and oranges, corresponds to her ending up with qualitatively less of some category of fruit (without any corresponding gains elsewhere).

It's possible that the fruit has negative value, and that the behavior aims to reduce the total negative value.

The situations:

8a1o, 0a3o, 2a2o, 5a1o.

If apples are minus two and oranges are minus seven then all trades are rational. 8a1o is valued at -23, 0a3o is valued at -21, 2a2o is valued at -18, 5a1o is valued at -17.

Japanese has formality as verb conjugations - http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F - iku 行く as "will go (plain)" and ikimasu 行きます as "will go (polite)". Translators try to preserve this, but I personally find translating that to be kinda hard. "I'll go" and "I will go" is the best I can do off the top of my head (watashi wa iku/watashi wa ikimasu - and as a more realistic example, kaisha ni iku/kaisha ni ikimasu - I'll go to the office/I will go to the office - "watashi/I" being left out because Japanese is contextual).

Ethereum is working on proof of stake, which boils down to "I believe that this future is what really happened, and to guarantee so, here's $1000 that you may destroy if it's not true."

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Key quote for me:

"in PoW, we are working directly with the laws of physics. In PoS, we are able to design the protocol in such a way that it has the precise properties that we want - in short, we can optimize the laws of physics in our favor. The "hidden trapdoor" that gives us (3) is the change in the security model, specifically the introduction of weak subjectivity."

0[anonymous]
Is a solution in which control of the network is secured through the same private keys that secure the stores of value an option?

Hmm, true.

I'm not sure you understood my other point, though - using the statistics for the ssc survey might contain a bias because see reasons above.

5ChristianKl
Unfortunately Scott doesn't seem to have a question that asks how much other blog posts besides SSC his readers read but I would estimate that number to be high.

One piece of obvious advice I've heard a lot is that you should exercise more.

I have a lot of ... probably weak ... counterarguments to this. They seem to be rationalizations; e.g. "I don't want to do this because ...".

For example, I'll list a few.

  • Why should I exercise if I'm already at a good weight?
  • Why should I exercise if my daily life (programming) does not require significant physical skill?
  • Why should I exercise if I already go on a short (15 min) daily walk - is more really needed?
  • I don't want to feel tired, so exercising doesn't feel
... (read more)
2CAE_Jones
You know, discovering LessWrong forced me to reconsider exactly this. I mean, the "you don't know what you're missing if you never had it" argument never seemed wrong before LW, just annoying. Realistically, if a cheap and quick-to-heal eye repair/replacement method became available tomorrow, I can only try to imagine how my brain would respond to a random extra input. And depth perception sounds like some terrifying mindscrew, and what is this business about eye-crossing and seeing double? And I am a wee bit worried about what having the ability to see people in full detail would do to me (my one good eye went bad before I ever considered looking at porn... the possibility is unsettling for some hard to identify reason). And driving, and getting a decent reading speed, and hand-writing, would all take a very long time—years, most likely. But nevertheless, leaving money on the ground is leaving money on the ground. I like braille, but it's less useful than print precisely because print is everywhere and everything is available in it. Learning math and science when most of the best books aren't readable is a pest. And I would be surprised if a whole sense shutting off isn't inherently depressing just due to decreased stimulation. Does exercise work similarly? Eh, it depends? The whole forcing yourself to do something you simply can't get excited about for nebulous health benefits suffers from a heavy cost in effort. OTOH, if an activity can be engaging and healthy, the effort-reward ratio is high from the beginning. So this is where we look for something fun to do, rather than hitting the gym. Of course, if there is not a fun or otherwise rewarding solution available, then we're right back where we started.
3RomeoStevens
Meta: if something has tons of evidence and you can't bring yourself to try it for a month ask yourself TDT-wise what your life looks like with and without skill of 'try seemingly good ideas for a month.'
0Lumifer
Recall the last time you had a cold with a fever or something similar. How did you feel? Slow, heavy, sluggish, low-energy, every movement takes an effort? Take that state and draw a line from it to you healthy condition. Now extend that line in the same direction: that's where regular exercise will take you.
3Elo
Let me have a go: Great question! The benefits of exercise run beyond weight loss. Exercise generally improves your health and keeps your system running and in check. Most people report extra clarity of mind relating to exercising as well. Something about chemicals and endorphins. Actually lots of people enjoy exercise, or if they don't at first - come to enjoy it quite easily. http://thefutureprimaeval.net/why-we-even-lift/ Actually that's probably enough. Numbers cited are usually 30mins of moderate exercise 3 times a week. if done correctly you can manage to not feel tired and instead feel energised. Sometimes it's different types of exercise, sometimes it's making sure you are eating the right things to help you feel great. QALYS, DALYS, Microlifes. It's usually quoted that exercising now will increase the length and quality of life later. (with diminishing returns) something like half an hour of exercise will add an extra several hours of life onto the end of your life. So the time returns later. You don't need to exercise alone or do nothing else. Can listen to books, can enjoy nature, can play a team sport. plenty of options to not make it wasted time. You don't. But if you want your best chance of survival for as long as possible, it's generally agreed that exercise helps you get there.

I stopped commenting on slatestarcodex because they disabled anonymous accounts and I didn't feel like signing up because the comments weren't that important for me anyway, plus there's enough comments down there already that there's too much noise to communicate anything.

5Lumifer
This. There is a certain optimal size range for an online community: too few people and it's stagnant, too many people and it's a cacophony of noise. Successful communities solve this problem by subdividing (see e.g. Reddit). I think SSC is already too big and the subdivision process is starting, e.g. there is an SSC subreddit which syphons off some comments, plus there's Slack, etc.

I also don't think that Scott gets much motivation from additional comments. The value of a commenting is higher in other blogs or LW.

And the second options feels like: "omg, we can't take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!".

You mean "the second option is disabled". which would leave upvote or ignore.

1Viliam
True, but I guess some people were doing this even before the downvotes were disables. Or sometimes we had a wave of downvotes first, then someone saying "hey, this contains some valid criticism, so I am going to upvote it, because we shouldn't just hide the criticism", then a wave of contrarian upvotes, then a meta-debate... eh.

Does it "not happen" or does it "unhappen" or does it "get fixed"?

Maybe your utility system works, but I don't feel like it matches our world.

Plus, what does the "negation" of an event even mean? If someone that I care about dies, I feel sad. If they then come back, I don't feel not-sad, rather I'd be pretty disturbed (and of course happy) because what the hell just happened.

That is to say, if you stab me, but then use a magic wand to make it go away, I don't go back to normal, I become really scared of you instead.

You could say that "negating" an event turns it into "it never happened". But... (read more)

0DragonGod
If an event happens, then the negation of the event is that event not happening. Someone you like dying is A. Negation A is the person living.

How about no, because I prefer my stability and I don't want to track random bets on stuff I don't care about?

Apply marginal utility and a 50/50 coin with the opportunity to bet a dollar, and you've got 50% chance to, say, gain 9.9998 points and 50% chance to lose 10 points. Why bother playing?

The only reasons to play are is if an option is discounted (4x payout for heads and 1.5x payout on tails on a fair coin), if you don't care about the winnings but about playing the game itself, or if there's a threshold to reach (e.g. if I had 200 dollars then I coul... (read more)

0Oscar_Cunningham
I'm not suggesting that people actually do this, just that this is a sensible assumption to make when laying the mathematical foundation of rationality.

I don't know if I'm neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn't have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won't work, but it certainly makes me go "hmm, well, he might have a point there".

Specifically:

  • "Normal" people don't need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
  • But here there's a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of
... (read more)
3Viliam
I have seen normies having endless fights about trivial things, such as "who should buy toilet paper", that a simple explicit norm could solve. (For example "people keep buying the paper in turns, when you buy one check this box to keep everyone informed" or "Joe buys the paper, everyone else gives Joe $2 each month" or whatever.) The best case, of course, would be trying to be nice by default, and solve explicitly the situations where the default behavior fails. But that seems like what would quite likely happen in the Dragon Army anyway... or maybe I am just applying the typical mind fallacy here.
5JacekLach
You're looking at content, not status (as implied by 'knocking someone down a peg'). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: "well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language". Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP. As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan's pretty safe.

I take methylphenidate but that's because I have ADD.

Can you un-metaphor this for me? I don't get what you're talking about.

0RomeoStevens
Strongly related to Sarah Constantin's research review on nootropics: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/nootropics/ If drugs work, please investigate the underlying integrity of your life/self care. Ie: coffee is less like throwing water on the out of control fire that is your sleep schedule and more like putting your fingers in your ears and and facing the other way.

I'm inclined to believe this because it fits with pretty much all the scenarios I have seen it used.

I am not sure I see or understand the issue that playing with your food is dangerous or anything. Maybe if you start catapulting it or juggling it, but sorting or stacking or making shapes doesn't seem dangerous to me.

I'm also not convinced that people will spit in my food if I play with it -

Hang on, if I write it down like that it just doesn't make any sense at all; First I receive my food and then I play with it, how are they gonna spit in it? Do they watch me and then spit in my desert? Or do they just start spitting in everyone's food (why?! It's not p... (read more)

What's Chesterton's Fence for "Don't play with your food"?

I did some thinking and googling and found that...

  • The food might get cold
  • The food might go places it shouldn't go, making things dirty (or you might get dirty hands by playing with your food and then things get dirty that way)
  • It's disrespectful to the chef (table manners)
  • It's annoying to the other people who are eating so please just stop
  • Touching the food might not be very hygienic

What reasons am I missing? If you're eating food that doesn't go cold on your own, is playing with your food bad?

2RolfAndreassen
It's disrespectful to people who don't have any food to eat, much less play with. Food is important, and this fact is easily forgotten.
4gjm
When I say anything like that to my daughter it's usually either (1) because she's playing with her food instead of eating it and we would prefer the meal to be of finite time and actually result in her getting the nutrition she needs, or (2) because what she's doing is annoying to other people at the table, or (3) because doing the same in other situations is likely to (a) annoy people and/or (b) make them think worse of her, which we would prefer to avoid. Note that 3b is (at least partly) a self-fulfilling-prophecy thing: "playing with your food" is socially unacceptable, so people try to stop their children doing it, so it continues to be seen as socially unacceptable. Which is kinda silly, but the fact that it's silly doesn't make it go away. Oh, also (4) because it may end up with the food going on the floor or the table or her clothes, all of which are suboptimal for one reason or another. I can't think of any particular reason why it should be bad to play with your food if you're on your own, you don't care how long you take, and you're confident of not making a mess.
3Lumifer
Not sure there is one. I see "Don't play with your food" as being in the same category as "Sit still! Don't fidget! Be quiet! Don't touch this!" which are all basically "Don't do anything which might end up with me expending more energy on you" mixed with a dose of "I am your boss so you do as I say". And yes, I agree with Dagon that parents are often judged by how well-behaved their kids are, so there is pressure to train them to behave as small Victorian-era adults.
2Viliam
It reduces people's motivation to become chefs (the people who are socially permitted to "play" with food). Society needs happy chefs. (Unhappy ones will spit in your food.) Also, even if you find a way to play with your food safely, there is the meta concern: Think of others, who are less skilled than you (so they cannot play with their food safely), and who will now try to copy your behavior. There may even emerge a social pressure to copy your behavior, if playing with food becomes a socially accepted costly signal of high dexterity or something.
3Dagon
* Parents will feel judged by their peers if their children are thought to be messy/unruly/sullen, and playing with food is some evidence of such.
4arundelo
If you're wondering how you can hold water in something made of paper, they're "often lined or coated with plastic or wax to prevent liquid from leaking out or soaking through the paper".

The important parts, for me:

Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. What’s more, when subjects are manipulated into believing in ego depletion through subtly biased questionnaires at the outset of a study, their performance suffers as well.

Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is re

... (read more)
2Wes_W
"Willpower is not exhaustible" is not necessarily the same claim as "willpower is infallible". If, for example, you have a flat 75% chance of turning down sweets, then avoiding sweets still makes you more likely to not eat them. You're not spending willpower, it's just inherently unreliable.

Are we talking about getting friends to help you for pizza or about a professional moving service? $20 seems cheap for movers but seems to be about the price for a couple pizzas.

8Brendan Long
Both numbers are for hiring people on Craigslist. $20 was in Rochester, MN and $50 was in Baltimore, MD.

You can use the water and soap you used to clean the plate for flushing out the first layer of crap out of the pan. Put the pan into the sink, then wash your plate. The water will end up in the pan. Your plate will most likely not be all that greasy compared to the pan.

2WalterL
Different things for each person. Security paranoia, 'always done it this way', perfectionism...

... I dunno. Plates are easy to wash. There's a push to get rid of plastic plates and all that because it's a waste that's not necessary if you just used regular stoneware plates...

Plus I don't know what kind of disposable dinnerware you're looking at but here in the Netherlands we mostly have these shitty flimsy plastic plates, if you were to put a hot meatball on that it just might burn a hole through the plate. If you're living on your own, how hard is it to wash a plate?

2RomeoStevens
I use paper plates, bowls, and cups. Plastic utensils.
4Good_Burning_Plastic
It's not obvious to me how that compares to the waste of water and soap in using disposable plates. Just stack several of them.

To what question are you responding? If we go by the title, you are surprised by people who pay for vetting cats?

0MaryCh
I misunderstood the title. Will edit my comment. (Although I was surprised when we failed to remove sutures from our cats' stomaches; I really expected it within our capabilities.)

How does a rational actor resolve the emperor's clothes?

Story link: http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html

Specifically, insert ourselves into every step of the process.

1) You're the emperor. Two tailors come to you saying they can make you a suit that cannot be seen by those that are stupid and/or unfit for their current position.

Answer to this, I think, is: You don't believe this magical stuff, see it for the scam that it is and tell them to bugger off.


2) You as the emperor, somehow agree to this. They take your measurem... (read more)

2MockTurtle
Interesting questions to think about. Seeing if everyone independently describes the clothes the same way (as suggested by others) might work, unless the information is leaked. Personally, my mind went straight to the physics of the thing, 'going all science on it' as you say - as emperor, I'd claim that the clothes should have some minimum strength, lest I rip them the moment I put them on. If a piece of the fabric, stretched by the two tailors, can at least support the weight of my hand (or some other light object if you're not too paranoid about the tailor's abilities as illusionists), then it should be suitable. Then, when your hand (or whatever) goes straight through, either they'll admit that the clothes aren't real, or they'll come up with some excuse about the cloth being so fine that it ripped or things go straight through, at which point you can say that these clothes are useless to you if they'll rip at the slightest movement or somehow phase through flesh, etc. Incidentally, that's one of my approaches to other things invisible to me that others believe in. Does it have practical uses or create a physical effect in the world? If not, then even if it's really there, there's not much point in acknowledging it...
3Viliam
Collect more evidence. If possible, find a person who never heard about the supposed properties of the clothes, and ask them to describe them to you. If they can't, maybe they are stupid, but then find another one and... uhm, if everyone who didn't hear about the supposed properties of the clothes is stupid, that's suspicious. Unexpectedly invite a few painters, put them in different corners of the room, and ask them to paint you in the clothes. Alternatively, test your ministers. First, meet them with the clothes; next, without them. If they see the clothes both times... Put the clothes in a bag. Add a few empty bags. Ask your ministers which bag contains the clothes. If all of them failed, ask the tailors.
0ChristianKl
The irony of the situation is that some fancy closes that are today worn in Milan leave a large part of the person naked. As different people for the color of the clothes and for more details. If the people really can see the clothes they should be able to describe the clothes in the same way. If there already common knowledge about the color of the clothes or details then it would be required to see the clothes in a new context. How do the clothes look like when they get wet? If two people agree how the clothes look under a completely new context it's more likely that they don't just tell you the answer they learned by heart.

Disclaimer: I have autism. I sometimes worry that despite functioning pretty well in society, some day, people will say "hey, these people have problems integrating with society sometimes! We should cure all the autisms!" and I'll be forcibly "cured" and have my personality (autism is a way of thinking, sometimes, so I think that this counts as part of someone's personality) altered against my will.

Compare with the deaf people, which is BOTH a culture and a disability. Same thing goes on here. I believe that a way should be found to pre... (read more)

6PhilGoetz
From what I've read, most of the protest in the deaf community currently is deaf parents insisting they have the right to deny treatment and audible education to their children--which they want to do because it will be too late for the children to get the treatment themselves when they're adults. If it were possible for their children to get the treatment and learn spoken language once they grew up, and potentially leave the deaf community, parents would have less motivation to deny treatment to them as children.
0Applesauce
yes. Forced treatment might not end well...in terms of emotional scarring, loss sense of identity.
2Oscar_Cunningham
Sometimes I worry that we'll find a way of curing autism in the womb and then all progress in mathematics will grind to a halt.

So, on one hand, I agree that it would be better if people were smarter on average.

On the other hand, you're using a lot of scary labels. ... Actually, after reflecting a bit, "Stupidity is a mental illness" is the only scary label. But it is a REALLY SCARY label. As in, my overton window is probably shifted, I dunno, 2 or 3 or 4 standard deviations in your direction, compared to the average person. I know about nootropics (at the very least, that they exist). And I'm sort of familiar with this community. And I still got scared reading this.

One o... (read more)

3DanArmak
That's the point of this post, I think. Mental illness is a very scary label - because it's a terrible thing to be. And we should work hard on being able to cure mental illness. Stupid is an equally terrible thing to be - terrible to yourself and to your friends and to society at large. We should work just as hard on making people not-stupid as we do on making them not-depressed. But we don't actually work hard on that, and that's a real problem.
5PhilGoetz
Do we force people to be treated for diabetes, cancer, or gout? No; we at most work to make it possible for them to get treatment.
0Applesauce
Yes, calling stupidity as a mental illness is very offending and dangerous... This can be seen as verbally attacking someone because of its aggressive lying undertones.

I would hate to see "treatment" forced onto them because they're not as smart as we'd like.

If the analogy here is with depression, that doesn't seem a likely outcome. Depressed people don't normally have anything forced onto them, unless they make it clear that there's a substantial imminent risk that they'll actually kill themselves.

I think the things that will get a mental illness forcibly treated are (1) that it genuinely makes the person who has it unable to function independently, or (2) that it puts other people at substantial risk. Stup... (read more)

Disclaimer: I have autism. I sometimes worry that despite functioning pretty well in society, some day, people will say "hey, these people have problems integrating with society sometimes! We should cure all the autisms!" and I'll be forcibly "cured" and have my personality (autism is a way of thinking, sometimes, so I think that this counts as part of someone's personality) altered against my will.

Compare with the deaf people, which is BOTH a culture and a disability. Same thing goes on here. I believe that a way should be found to pre... (read more)

Interesting part of the article, for me:

“Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology,” Ezra Klein explained in a profile of Kahan’s work. “Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.”

Personally, I encountered this in the wild. My brother asked me "do you know what the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + and so on sums up to?" "Well," I said, "That sums up to infinity."

"No, it's -1/12!", he exclaims. I exclaimed that this was bullshit - there are only positive numbers in the series, there are only additions in the series, and since adding positive numbers together produces a positive number, the "negative a twelfth" result is just plain wrong.

We had a bit of an argument after that, after which he... (read more)

I get the feeling that if you told Jenny all this they'd get angry at you at some point of your explanation. It feels kinda manipulative. I don't get this "manipulative" feeling from the example. The end result seems good, though.

6TiffanyAching
You're absolutely right, it was totally, consciously manipulative and I'm not going to try to justify that with a bunch of utility boilerplate - but I'd claim that the manipulation element lay only in my tacit implication that Jenny must, as a matter of course, see the question as I did. The "as I'm sure you already know" stuff. Is there a name for that? It's like begging the question on purpose, treating an important assumption as though it's settled and barreling ahead before they can get a word in. It's embarrassing - socially difficult - for someone to interrupt in order to correct you, to say "wait a minute, back up, that's all fine and dandy but I actually believe that the crystals themselves are magic." Especially someone with only a shaky ability to articulate their belief in the first place, like Jenny. It was intellectual bullying in a small way and I don't really know why I felt I had to do it like that. Petty fun, maybe? The devil is strong in me where crystals are concerned. But I believe the rest of my idea still stands - there goes the tablecloth again - if you remove that unnecessarily manipulative element. if I had just simply and honestly discussed all the reasons I find crystals and their - ahem - healing properties fascinating, which again are all true, I would have still been making a model available to Jenny which preserved most of what she valued about her belief while jettisoning the belief itself.

Stackexchange (or Q&A sites in general) is also a popular hit for me, but that might just be google profiling me.

I did not read the link.

But I also think that drugging myself like that for this is not OK.

Yes, and I can probably include that in the automation. I already have a list of my own records, but updating it is a pain and as a result I tend to just head over to storage. Reducing the workload to keep the list updated should resolve some of those troubles as well.

But Jacob had not touched a child. He had contacted whom he thought was a 10-year-old girl in a chat room and made plans to meet up with her. When he arrived, he discovered he had been corresponding with an undercover police officer, and was arrested for luring a minor.

The title of the article contradicts the content. Therefore, this is crap journalism.

The task itself is annoying because everything takes too long. Because it's a game, you have to walk over to storage and you have to walk over to auction and basically when you see something for cheap in the auction, answering the question "how much of that do I have already" takes 30 seconds. Then to get back to the auction and the listing you were looking at takes probably another 15 seconds. This makes the whole process feel like bleh because, well, it's...

It's like using a slow and unresponsive website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtbYPITW... (read more)

0gjm
Is there a way you can keep your own records of what stuff you have so that you don't need to keep walking over to storage in-game to check?

Because automating the clicking is pretty hard and subject to needing maintenance every time the game updates (which is about every 2 months or so)... and automating the "what do I need" part is easy and can probably be done in 2-3 hours.

Yes, I could convert it into a daily 5 minute task, or a weekly 30 minute task. This leads to some overhead, though. Most of the work is identifying how much I need of what - making 2 stacks instead of 8 just means I have to click a bit less.

... So I had an idea just now, there's the ability to get a html table of all my items - I could probably parse this with some tool, which could help me with doing the work. I'd still have to do all the clicking, but some of the stock taking could be automated like that, and this could help me with structuring and organizing the task as such that it's less uncertain.

0Gurkenglas
Why not automate the clicking as well? Replace yourself by a script, then go find another arbitrage to exploit.
2gjm
It feels like there might be more benefit (if it's possible) in separating the task into genuinely different subtasks rather than just "smaller" ones. It depends on whether the task is ugh-ish (1) just because there's too much of it to feel (in anticipation) like fun or (2) because it produces that "aargh, I don't even know where to start with this damn thing" feeling. If #1, just splitting it into smaller bits might suffice. If #2, it needs splitting into simpler bits. (Yes, splitting it will probably make it less efficient. But it may be better to have something inefficient that you will actually do than something efficient that you won't.) But if you can automate part of it so that there's just less to do, as your second paragraph suggests, that sounds really promising.

I have this but different!

It's not dirty - it's static electricity for me. Worked at a place that had carpet, and I had to work with poorly grounded cameras. Got zapped EVERY SINGLE DARN TIME.

Now I tend to pull my sleeve over my hand before touching something.

... You could try wearing gloves (there's fingerless gloves, if you get some thin ones, they can be for comfy winter use).

You could try chaining various events - e.g. "when do your hands need to be clean?" and then everything that is "eh" dirty is okay to handle for that time. So, ... (read more)

4Sithlord_Bayesian
This is especially helpful! I think I developed the habit of washing my hands so much while working in an insufficiently safe chemistry lab, with lots of students who were less than safe. Hearing this does provide me with some needed system 1 verification that I'm allowed to be less paranoid. I treat myself as I must have clean hands for doing anything that won't get them dirty. I've experimented with chaining various events, too, and that's a good strategy. One thing I might try in the future is doing chains of things where I need clean hands, and sneaking in a couple things that sound like they might get my hands dirty, but actually wouldn't, like having tea. Like a sort of exposure therapy, maybe. Thanks!

I am NOT going to drug myself into forming a habit. This is a ~25 euro/hour, 1 hour per week side hobby, which I could miss without any problems. ... Maybe that's the wrong counterargument but I feel it's too dangerous for the rewards involved. (I wouldn't try smoking if you gave me money because I hear from people that it's hard to quit.)

The public commitment thing is something I use myself from time to time, and I can make use of it - I will make use of it a bit more (I even used this post as a sort of public commitment) but the whole idea of a "rea... (read more)

0taygetea
Nicotine use and smoking are not at all the same thing. Did you read the link?

I think I could try this. I had thought of this solution myself, but ... I don't know why I dismissed it. Maybe because I hadn't done the proper thinking in regards to how much time there is being having to restock, so there was no period to schedule it for (so the objection was "It's unschedulable" which is no longer true).

I have tried this. I find that neither task (the watching of the series AND the work) gets done properly. I miss half the jokes or only get them half and end up half-smiling rather than laughing... and I'm constantly busy with switching contexts. Listening to music on the other hand works fine, which is what I'm doing now. The music turns the boring task into something okay-ish (I'd rather be doing a full-time fun activity like playing some game, though once I started I don't mind because I'm enjoying the music).

How do you prevent or stop the creation of an "ugh field"?

Context

There's a game I play which uses real money - Entropia Universe. In this game, I am a trader - though most of my activity is reselling resources (stackable items). I buy large stacks of various resources, and then split these up into smaller stacks which are more affordable for the regular buyer. I then list these smaller stacks on the in-game auction.

There is an app for this game. Using this app, I can see which stacks have sold and how much I have left of each item. The app also a... (read more)

3gjm
Can you turn the 45-minute task into a larger number of smaller less intimidating tasks?
1Hal
Some more standard advice would be to make some kind of public commitment to it, so there's somebody else to hold you accountable. This could be kind of difficult when it's something as unimportant as a video game, as that might make you look pretty weird (depending on your friends and your relationships with them), but you could do it very casually; even just mentioning the task in passing in a conversation would probably help. I also find that making a "public" commitment helps even when it's not actually public; just consciously focusing on the subject and committing to hold yourself accountable for doing it at a certain time can be surprisingly effective (I like to say it out loud, as this seems to help, but I talk to myself a lot anyway so it might just be a personal thing). I can't really vouch for this method's effectiveness, though; I've never really tried to permanently solve a recurring problem like the one you describe with it, I've only used it as a band-aid to get past the "ugh field" a few times. It may lose its effectiveness with repetition, if it even ever works at all for you. A last possibility in this category, depending on how serious you are about this, would be to try something like Beeminder that would ideally give you the motivation to push past the "ugh field" and get used to doing what you need to do. Since I don't yet know how to embed links in words, here it is: https://www.beeminder.com/ For something more fun, if probably less practical, you could try to drug yourself into forming a habit. You've probably heard of people trying to use reinforcement learning on themselves, basically -- allowing themselves to eat candy (or some other kind of reward) when they do the target activity. I'm really doubtful that this is actually useful for most people (though I haven't looked much into it -- I just have a vague, bad feeling about it; it's probably worth investigating). Luckily, though, you can try something better: using nicotine to turbo-boo
2ChristianKl
Can you shedule it to a fixed date every two weeks? Maybe it's easier if it happens at a fixed shedule than if you have to decide whether or not to do it every evening.
0WalterL
Can you multitask it? Just do it while you watch whatever series. Presumably most of the clicking is mindless. When there is a part where you have to think, just pause the stream and spend a few seconds pondering, then kick it back off.
Load More