All of Sinal's Comments + Replies

I think this EA forum post explaining Shapley Values encapsulates my current opinion better than my comments above.

Actually I was saying that if only tie breaks matter, then in the case of a tie-break, everyone who voted for the losing party also saves 10,000 lives each. Because if they didn't vote against saving lives, then it wouldn't be a tie break, and then no individual would save any lives at all.

Of course, I don't actually believe that - I think voting matters even if it wouldn't break a tie.

In the scenario where you vote last in the tie-break, it is true everything depends on you. But everything depended on everyone else too, even though th... (read more)

In one sense, "Rationality" is used to signify that something is part of the community that is associated with EA, Lesswrong, SSC, rationalist tumblr, secular solstice etc. If someone asked me "I have a successful life, what use is Rationality?" in this sense, I would probably reply there might not be any use at all. I happen to like rationalist tumblr and SSC and I like going to the SSC meetups at David Friedman's house, but you may or may not. Whatever floats your boat.

Now, if somebody ACTUALLY asked me "what use is rational... (read more)

I don't get the sentiment of "your vote only matters if it would be an exact tie otherwise." By that logic, if the outcome of a US presidential election would either save 10,000 lives or not, then the altruistic thing to do is to get the vote as close 50/50 as possible, so that every voter can save 10,000 lives each for a total of 3 trillion lives saved, as opposed to the normal outcome, where no lives are saved at all.

Don't know if anyone still follows this 7 year old thread but-

I strongly recommend Marie Kondo's book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The gist is you declutter by category of item instead of by room: first do all of the dishes, then do all your clothing items, then books, etc. For instance, to declutter your closet, take out all the clothes and sort into two piles: clothes that make you happy and clothes that don't.

I've also found that goodwill will accept lots of different kinds of items not just clothes.

And remember, it's... (read more)

This post makes me miss my days in marching band, or in the Boy Scouts. Honestly it doesn't sound all that authoritarian. Can you not accomplish the same thing using a traditional organization and a meeting place? Why does it have to be a house?

The food policy strikes me as one of the more trivial and unimportant parts of the proposal. I'm not saying you're taking it too seriously -- I think that shared living spaces should have clear rules about who gets to eat what. It's just that this particular food policy seems easily to change without changing the core "authoritarian" structure of the Dragon Barracks.

Funny story by the way, I really like it.

I personally found this post to be quite insightful. I previously made plenty of vague goals that I never did, such as "apply for internships", "fill out this form", and shower more often." I have heard the advice "set specific goals" before, but the idea of turning vague goals into if-then" goals has never occurred to me before.

Of course, since I just read this post a few minutes ago, I don't know whether the idea actually translates into increased productivity or not.

Maybe rss feeds?

I just performed this experiment assuming I wouldn't be able to discern tap water from water cooler water, but I was able to--my tap water is slightly more metallic tasting.

Link for the video doesn't work

Done, but I'm afraid the fingertip measurements were not very precise