"Cruxy" is a useful term to have in my vocabulary. I use it relatively loosely to refer to the type of thing I look for in a double crux. A consideration is more "cruxy" if it's closer to a but-for support for a proposition. Interestingly (mildly) this is very similar to the definition of "crucial," and in fact the etymologies are the same.
I'm a big fan of land reclamation, but hadn't heard of most of these barriers, thanks!
You might be interested in this "Best of LessWrong" post, Make more land.
This post is very cute. I also reference it all the time to explain the 'inverse cat tax.' you You can ask my colleagues, I definitely talk about that model a bunch. So, perhaps strangely, this is my most-referenced post of 2022. 🙃
My explanation of a model tax: this forum (and the EA Forum) really like models, so to get a post to be popular, you gotta put in a model.
I've referenced this post several times. I think the post has to balance being a straw vulcan with being unwilling to forcefully say its thesis, and I find Raemon to be surprisingly good at saying true things within that balance. It's also well-written, and a great length. Candidate for my favorite post of the year.
You get paid if Wave does well whether they like you or not.
Private companies can and do prevent people they don't like from selling stock to private buyers. So as an addition to this comment, I'd note that "the ability to cash out before an IPO 5+ years in the future" is a strong reason not to make an enemy of your former startup.
I've historically said 1-2 weeks of skilled engineering work. That will lower by a factor of 2 after this branch, plus some follow ups, get merged.
Thanks for writing about ForumMagnum! This software is so much of my life, but understandably gets little attention an an object in its own sake.
That's changing a bit now, and more people are reaching out about using it. — I think it's the best forum software out there.
If someone reading this wants to build an instance, feel free to reach out.
Talon Voice, which I use for voice-commanding my computer, is very fast and has a linux version. I don't know if it would run on a small machine, but it seems worth a shot. And it seems perfect for your command-centered use-case. To get more information, I would ask in their slack.
We use Asana for this. (It's broadly great, and I don't understand how Jira isn't getting its lunch completely eaten. And I'm not just saying that because of my funder.)
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the mental attitude here is still extremely useful. For example, you may be dealing with something outside of your usual ticket system, or a ball may be smaller than something that would justify an Asana ticket.
I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that's reasonably popular. I thought I'd crosspost here. The context is "What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?"
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CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of "who owns this ball."[1] I'm gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.
Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls
If you are having a conversation and someone's like "we should do X"... Someone should really be the p...
This comment feels like wishful thinking to me. Like, I think our communities are broadly some of the more truth-seeking communities out there. And yet, they have flaws common to human communities, such as both 1 and 2. And yet, I want to engage with these communities, and to cooperate with them. That cooperation is made much harder if actors blithely ignore these dynamics by:
Is that common?
My model was that this is the thing going on for many night owls. I believe I had studies at one point that would back this up, but could not immediately find them.
if you benefit from a visual indication of wake time blacking out the external light and replacing it with light under your control seems much better, if you can get it bright enough?
I'm not in principle opposed. The approach you mention has super conceptual benefits under the model you and I share. In practice, I find my friends often have lights that go from zero to very bright ...
This post was a great dive into two topics:
I think this post was good on it's first edition, but became great after the author displayed admirable ability to update their mind and willingness to update their post in light of new information.
Overall I must reluctantly only give this post a +1 vote for inclusion, as I think the books are better served by more general rationality content, but I'm terms of what I would like to see more of on this site, +9. Maybe I'll compromise and give +4.
I think the problem with zoom meetings is not the meeting itself, but instead the bounds of the meeting. It's easier to have better coordination if you can freely wander in and out of a casual conversation. It's hard to get super-in-sync over, say, 60 minutes a day of facetime. To put another way, zoom does fine for "full meeting" mode, but much worse for casual, semi-meeting mode. VR does nothing to solve the second category, so I'm skeptical.
I really buy the argument Sinclair makes about reducing trivial inconveniences here. Let’s make a model.
Ambiguity has two main negative effects, according to me:
Let’s set 1. aside for now. 2. seems like a big deal for sure. ...
This is really neat. Thanks for helping me build a technical base (eyyyy) for understanding my partner's work.
One thing that wasn't clear to me is: if you can only sequence 150 bases at a time, how do you build a complete picture of a genome? One might come away from your post thinking that next gen sequencing is only useful for getting the edges of the genome, say for simple identification purposes. Based on "chopped up your fragments" and my preexisting knowledge, I expect you do some sort of chopping and then reassembly, but I'd be curious to learn more...
I would also expect less exposure in a normal office meeting than at a dance
How do I square that with:
so I would say our ventilation was successful at keeping us from going above standard indoor exposure despite the number of people and active movement
I think "faces being further apart" is basically what I mean in the final two sentences.
I think this is really cool. I nevertheless expect perhaps that I would be that a normal office meeting would result in less exposure than this dance. I'm not actually sure where my intuition is coming from, but I'm going to say it's due in part to the increased exertion of the dancers causing more potential virus to get mixed into the air, and that this effect is bigger than the increase in CO2 from exertion, if you follow me. The other part would be that perhaps the measurement is too far away from the center of the dance? Hypothetically, if I imagine finding out that the CO2 levels stayed below 1000ppm even in the middle of the dancers, I'd be less skeptical.
Tag suggestion: "Air Quality". There's a bunch of things in a cluster of space around here, you could imagine one or more tags. Carbon dioxide, air particulate pollution, and aerosolized respiratory pathogens. The last one may seem a bit of an odd duck, but the techniques for dealing with it are often the same as the others.
Economic efficiency and a 5 year old bet
5 years ago, my then-boss and I realized we disagreed about something. He thought the oil and gas sector was clearly on the decline, and would be a bad place to put your money. I was a big fan of the efficient market hypothesis, and though, well, shouldn't that already be priced in?
He was confident and willing to give me good odds, but wanted to be clear he was talking over the very long term. So we agreed: 5 years term, 70% odds. If the O&G sector trailed the S&P 500 by more than 25%, I'd pay him ¢30, if it ...
I would also expect extraneous details like, "got sick and fell of the wagon" or similar to add significant noise. And with only one data point each, it'd be hard to know the variance to use. I'm guess I'd trust this study more?