Minor exception to Taleb's Surgeon: if charisma is directly relevant to job performance (as in sales, for example), feel free to take the more charismatic candidate.
10. Everyday Razor - If you go from doing a task weekly to daily, you achieve 7 years of output in 1 year. If you apply a 1% compound interest each time, you achieve 54 years of output in 1 year.
What's the intuition behind this -- specifically, why does it make sense to apply compound interest to the daily task-doing but not the weekly?
I think the second part is bullshit anyway, I can't come up with a single example where compounding is possible to a whole year in a row, for something related to personal work/output/results.
I think that came from James Clear's Atomic Habits, talking about how if you get 1% better at something every day, then you get >30 times better at it after a year (1.01^365 = 37.7). But it has to be something where improvement by a factor of 30 is possible e.g. running a mile.
I think it makes sense that you can repeatedly get 30x better at, say, reducing p(doom), especially if you're starting from zero, but the 1% per day dynamic depends on how different types of things compound (e.g. applying the techniques from the CFAR handbook compounding with getting better at integrating bayesian thinking into your thoughts, and how those compound with getting an intuitive understanding of the Yudkowsky-christiano debate or AI timelines).
19. Recursive Taleb's surgeon
If someone is significantly relying on Taleb's surgeon to make a choice, then they are not competent enough to discern actual competence.
Absolutely! I like some of these razors better than others.
Competence assessment is way more accurate in some fields than others e.g. software engineering (does the code run?) vs legal work or policy research (where have they worked before?).
20. Memetic Razor: If you hear news "through the grapevine" or see something on the "popular" feeds of social media, it has likely traveled a long journey of memetic selection to get to you, and is almost certainly modified from the original.
I'm interested in people's opinions on this:
If it's a talking point on Reddit, you might be early.
Of course the claim is technically true; there's >0% chance that you can get ahead of the curve by reading reddit. But is it dramatically less likely than it was, say, 5/10/15 years ago? (I know 'reddit' isn't a monolith; let's say we're ignoring the hyper-mainstream subreddits and the ones that are so small you may as well be in a group chat.)
I don't use Twitter/X, I only saw this because it was on https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky which I check every day (an example of a secure way to mitigate brain exposure to news feed algorithms).
The galaxy-brained word combinations here are at the standard of optimization I hold very highly (e.g. using galaxy-brained combinations of words to maximize the ratio of value to wordcount).
If someone were to, for example, start a human intelligence amplification coordination takeoff by getting the best of both worlds between the long, intuitive CFAR handbook and the short, efficient hammertime sequence, this is the level of writing skill that they would have to be playing at: