meta: On top of the article please link the LessWrong Study Hall to the wiki page about how to access it.
One big example of a successful study project is the LessWrong Study Hall, which is still active 1.5 years after it was started.
Ship it. Get feedback from some readers. Use feedback to improve your ideas and your writing. Repeat.
Bought new headphones
A friend of mine noticed that I'm often frustrated at work, and she asked if that's normal. I thought about it for a while, and found one low-hanging fruit to optimise: open-space office noise. Bought a new pair of headphones that offer decent noise isolation. My distractability dropped perceptibly. I'm satisfied with that change.
FWIW we already do have at least two users who live in timezones with fractional UTC offset. That's why I always use UTC time when announcing new pomodoros.
I'm going. It looks that the LessWrong Study Hall is going to have a strong representation in this event.
Beeminding +4. I've found that the default 1 year goal length is too long for me. These days I'm usually doing 1 month long goals. I've found that the easiest formula to follow is to beemind doing at least a little bit of the thing you want to do every day, without quantifying how much you've actually done.
LessWrong Study Hall +7. I'm a regular there. In terms of the procrastination equation the pomodoro rhythm decreases delay, peer pressure decreases impulsiveness, and social chat during pomodoros increases value. Tinychat IMO is not a good piece of softw...
I'm a regular there. Here are my observations.
This is fun. I haven't had this much social fun on-line for a decade. I'm a corporate stooge, and usually sitting at a keyboard and typing for a living is not that social and not that fun for me. As much as I enjoy spending time there, the mere social fun is not the purpose. I've noticed that whenever I join the chat without a clear goal, I tend to drift through pomodoros without achieving that much. I first need to do some GTD-style analysis of what project I want to work on, and what are actionable steps to t...
How did you handle the IHOP joke a few lines above the stewberries?
I faced an ugh field. So far the results are satisfactory. I haven't been eaten by a grue.
This ugh field is interaction with male authority figures, specifically when the subject of this interaction is some technical field, in which competence is viewed as a manly trait. I often lack such competence, and feel very awkward (dare I say "unmanly"?) when dealing with men who have it.
Two most recent examples of facing this ugh field: ...
Here are the links to the official and well typeset PDF versions of two of the above Caplan's articles:
IMHO that's a really important point. You get a better grasp about consequences of your choice after trying several options and seeing how the consequences of different actions differ.
The best laboratory example of this is playing go on a computer. Typical go software records your games, and then lets you replay, play different variants, analyze when things went really bad after a silly move, etc. After a while you get a tree of diverging game records. In some you won, in others you lost. It's a good learning experience.
(disclaimer: I'm not sure how to un-compartmentalize this learning to be applicable in real life, not just in a game of go)
Is it an academic exercise, or are you planning a real wedding reception party?
BTW, what are your thoughts about Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project after watching this documentary?
Keep in mind lesswrong's equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
60's LessWrong would be Ayn Rand's Objectivism rather than some yet another interpretation of Marxism.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
It might be the error where "X years ago" counts back from 2000 instead of the current year.
My wife and I are working on translating HPMoR into Polish. Tonight she'll finish the first draft of chapter 4, and I'm about to finish editing the final version of chapter 3. We plan to publish it when we have 5 chapters ready.
A few hours later, I find I remain physically pained when attempting to come to terms with the notion that a person could express the belief that only genetically modified tomatoes have genes. The very ability to formulate the statement requires knowledge that contradicts the belief.
I do not find this belief paradoxical. Folk science GMO in one sentence goes like this: you grab a normal tomato, and you add some genes to it, that make this tomato bigger, or less prone to mold, or something. One does not need to comprehend high-school genetics to get this stub of an idea.
You don't need to use your Twitter or Facebook credentials. You even don't want to, since tinychat will spam your feeds. Logging in as tinychat guest is the status quo for pretty much everyone on the LWSH.