All of norswap's Comments + Replies

I would highly suggest that anyone interested in sleep check the first few episodes of the Huberman Labs podcast, which are focused on this very issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1TxQj9IsQ&list=PLPNW_gerXa4Pc8S2qoUQc5e8Ir97RLuVW&index=28
(Confusingly, the playlist is in reverse order.)

The take-away are likely to be different for different people (a lot of mechanisms and techniques are covered), but for me they were:
1. cold showers in the morning - those really wake me up and flush away the grogginess that normally persists for a long time
2. s... (read more)

Truly inspiring! Are you not afraid you risk falling out of the bandwagon implemeting so many changes in your life simulatenously? I'm not doubting your ability or plan, just going from personal experience that trying to change too many at once has been too ambitious for my time budget in the past.

Might be, but you ought to provide an explanation for the mechanics of it instead of a blank admonition.

The number of validators is irrelevant (well, you want it to be large enough so that a few players can't collude to control a majority of the validating power) - what's important is their scale, i.e. how much does one need to stake in order to acquire a majority of the validating power and take over the network.

I'm strongly endorsing this, having done the same thing you did (spent two evenings looking at this stuff) and having come up pretty much exactly with the same picture, and the same set of questions/uncertainties.

Something I found very interesting is the fact that Ethereum is poised to move from proof-of-work (miners who solve a cryptographically hard problem to verify transactions, minting new coins in the process) to proof-of-stake (where one "stakes" coins for a chance to verify transactions, earning interest in the process — I'm not entirely comfortabl... (read more)

I can't judge because I didn't follow the course, but I'd like to share my a priori reaction:

One should not have to modify a working program. One should be able to add to it to implement new functionality or to adjust old functions for new requirements. We call this additive programming.

That does sound like a terrible idea. It's often used to justify horrendous abstractions and over-architecturing, for instance. Now this can make sense when third-parties depend on the code. But if you can change the code, it's often better to do so.

The other school that I ... (read more)

This explanation misses one major piece of the whole affair: it was not only a short squeeze (mostly, it was at first), but also a gamma squeeze (or gamma trap). It has to do with the hedging of option sales.

Here is a short explanation I wrote for a colleague:

gamma trap: most options are sold by market makers (e.g. investment banks), and they hedge the options they sell by purchasing (or selling) stock in order to be "delta neutral"
so if they sell one call at the money (strike price = current price), the delta is 0.5 (if the stock price increases by 1$, th

I agree, but I think the converse point is also true: employers will attempt to pay you less (under industry standards) if the job incurs any kind of side-effect that you might be proud about, or is in a glamorous industry.

I think this is a more important point.

The "it's not just about the money, but also about X, Y, Z" (freedom, cool working conditions, social impact, ...) is almost a platitude. I've had multiple employers using on me, and it really it wasn't warranted at all (the jobs were in niche sectors, but weren't glamorous, impactful to society, no... (read more)

Nominating because the idea that rationalists should win (which we can loosely defined as "be better at achieving their goals than non-rationalists") has been under fire in the community (see for instance Scott's comment on this post).

I think this discusses the concern nicely, and shows what rational self-improvement may look like in practice, re-framing expectations.

While far from the only one, this was one important influence in my own self-improvement journey. It's certainly something that comes to mind whenever I think of my own self-improvement philosophy, and when it comes to trying to convince other to do similarly.

It worked! Also now that my interpretation has been confirmed, I can bask in the warm afterglow of rightness. What a day.

I assumed this was some kind of pastiche of the judgy-overarchiever trope, and I was quite entertained under that reading. But now I've come to the comments and everyone seems to interpret the post earnestly. I'm confused.

The question pops up regularly. Jacob (Jacobian on here) wrote an answer here: https://putanumonit.com/2019/12/08/rationalist-self-improvement/

One issue I see is the narrow definition of winning used here. I think that people reflective enough to embrace rationality would also be more likely to reconsider the winning criteria not to just be "become filthy rich and/or famous". Consider that maybe the prize is not worth the price. I'd be more interested into people that have become wealthy/established/successful in their fields (without becoming a rock star ... (read more)

This pays lip services to the sequences, but I don't really see a condensed version of what it teaches in the proposed materials. Not that I have a proposal for that either, but maybe someone has?

He is not overstating.

To summarize the two main points, which other people already made:

• Any wealth tax is on top of inflation. One cannot ban inflation without disastrous economic consequences (or so I'm lead to believe).
• Invested capital tends to appreciate along with inflation, which makes sense if you think about it, otherwise it means it's losing value. Non-inflation adjusted returns on the stock market are much higher when the inflation is high. Also there is no reason not to stash all your money in the safest possible asset to avoid inflation.

It very much is a non-quantitative argument - since it's a matter of principle. The principle being not to let outside perceptions dictate the topic of conversations.

I can think of situations were the principles could be broken, or unproductive. If upholding it would make it impossible to have these discussions in the first place (because engaging would mean you get stoned, or something) and hiding is not an option (or still too risky), then it would make sense to move conversations towards the overton window.

Said otherwise, the quantity I care about ... (read more)

I assume you are not trying to date homeless women. I also assume that women who try to find a date usually don't go to homeless shelters.

I'm not entirely certain about that assumption, to be honest.

I have an extremely negative emotional reaction to this.

More seriously. While LW can be construed as "trying to promote something" (i.e. rational thinking), in my opinion it is mostly a place to have rational discussions, using much stronger discursive standards than elsewhere on the internet.

If people decide to judge us on cherry pickings, that is sad, but it is much better than having them control what topics are or are not allowed. I am with Ben on this one.

About your friend in particular, if they have to be turned off of the community because... (read more)

Totally. But it's cool to want to teach things, and kids actually like to learn when it's fun. So offer to teach, don't impose your teaching. Be ready to jettison your plans and go with whatever your daughter finds interesting. This is what seems to work best in practice (from remembered anecdotal evidence).

I want to discuss the specific example you picked: Etsy & A/B (or generally, data-driven) testing.

I'll start by agreeing to your premise in the abstract: Etsy could probably have done better by using a better A/B testing methodology and doing so sooner.

But: while superior tools used effectively are superior, they also tend to be harder to use and to cause more damage when misused. I've seen a bunch of math-based data-driven analysis that wasn't worth a damn because they were misused. The more sophisticated these tools become, the easier ... (read more)

It doesn't have to be optimal, the question is whether it is better. Is it better to wash all the time (as described in the post), like most people (let's say before eating and after using the bathroom), once-twice a day, or not at all (hands only washed during showers)? I'm not quite sure that "all the time" is better (it could be, but I'm not sure).

There is clearly a phenomenon of adapting to pathogens. I've heard it firsthand from at least two people who worked in less sanitary areas (South-American slums and Center-Af... (read more)

I came to the comment section expecting to see someone pointing out that not washing out your hands so much could improve your immune system by exposing you to more germs, pathogens, etc.

Well, since nobody did. I'm pointing it out. The argument seems sound to me. Is there something to be said against this perspective? Or something more in favor of it?

Clearing a fully-general counter-argument: Everything is based on some amount of trust - radical doubt just doesn't scale - you couldn't trust most of what your science textbook tells you without running a lot of experiments, which people don't tend to do.

With that out of the way, you can decide who to trust based on other information. So in this case, you can look at the collection of people reporting sports-related improvement, and see how it overlaps with people saying that <dubious thing> made them feel better.

As far as I know, the... (read more)

People report they feel better after they take up exercise / get in shape though. This is not strictly health, but I'd be very surprised if someone tried to argue it's not correlated. I'd also be surprised that everyone is self-deceiving — especially since that would make me one of them ;)

As for cognitive benefits... I'm more skeptical of that. I haven't experienced something profound on that front. But you do better work when you feel better day round. I think that ability to focus for longer periods of time improved slightly.

I don't think we necessarily disagree. Photo feeler does not strike me as requiring a large effort. But taking new pictures did. (In my case the new pictures did work better, so that was a required step.)

I think what you're saying here is that taking pictures wasn't a big effort for you (since just a friend could do it?). But for me too it was just my brother who lives with me and using my mobile phone.

And objectively, I expect for some people this is cake-walk, but for me it felt very tedious (but at least I ended up doing it! though it required quite a bit of willpower, explaining why other people who are like me would end up never implementing this strategy).

Here is what confuses me: from before, I thought morphisms were "just" arrows between objects, with a specific identity.

But in the case of functions, we have to smuggle in the set of ordered pairs that define them. Do you simply equate the identity of a function with this set definition?

That might be fine, but it means there needs to be some kind of ... semantics? that gives us the "meaning" (~ implementation) of composition based on the "meaning" (the set of ordered pairs) of the composed morphisms.

Am I right here?

I'll add the biggest minus in my book:

• No inter-notes hyperlinks (source)

Potential alternatives:

• https://laverna.cc/
• https://inkdrop.app (not sure if has hyperlinks, couldn't find the info)

This was a really heartwarming story that brought a smile to my face!

I'd like to give a special shout-out to

As we go I'm going to continue to try very hard not to pressure or manipulate her, while still giving advice and helping her explore her motivations here.

That's very important indeed.

I watched one or two videos of this channel a while back and was impressed by the seemingly solid - but non-conventional - argument (it was on salt intake). I subscribed and was *dismayed* by further videos. I wouldn't put much stock into the either the research being quoted (if you didn't review it yourself) nor the treatment of the research made by this channel.

That being said, I haven't watched this particular video. What it says might all be true.

I'd be more interested in the in-between: what about cases where we don't have general AI, but we have automation that drastically cuts jobs in a field, without causing counter-balancing wage increases or job creation in another field?

For instance, imagine the new technology is something really simple to manufacture (or worse, a new purpose for something we already manufacture en masse) — it's so easy to produce these things, we don't need really need to hire more workers, just push a couple levers and all the demand is met just like th... (read more)

I think rationality ought to encompass more than explicit decision making (and I think there are plenty of writing on this website that show it does even within the community).

If you think of instrumental rationality of the science of how to win, then necessarily it entails considering things like how to setup your environment, unthinking habits, how to "hack" into your psyche/emotions.

Put otherwise, it seems you share your definition of Rationality with David Chapman (of https://meaningness.com/ ) — and I'm thinking of that + what he calls ... (read more)

Seems to me you're on about treating (or more to the point, dreaming about treating) the cure rather than the symptoms that make people vulnerable to the social network sink in the first place. The same fundamental weakness probably has a lot of other failure modes.

Category theory, of which I'm acquainted with at a basic level, seems to formalize a lot of regularities I already knew about as a programmer and a student of <those mathematics topics that were taught to me as part of my CS master's degree>.

I found it mathematically neat, but I have never derived any useful insights from it. Said otherwise, nothing would have changed if I had never been introduced to it. This seems quite wrong to me, so I was quite interested in reading the answers here. Unfortunately, there is not much in ways of insight.

What is this? The links seem to require some login and registration is limited to students of some specific universities.

Is it even possible to avoid for a curated selection to be deemed better? Maybe only if it fails horribly at what it set out to do, but otherwise?

I strongly second Michaël's recommendation — of any place, the front page of Less Wrong is where things should be clear.

Great post! More of an exploration than a presentation, but a thoroughly enjoyable one.

Last year, I sat down with some hard thoughts about my own life philosophy, and came out with essentially the same conclusion: that enjoying life is about the process of getting somewhere rather than about actually getting there.

There are some intriguing new elements here, including the link with entropy (though I do tend to think that the ending is perhaps a tad too abstract and speculative).

I too, was inspired by reading and quotes, here are a few that guided me in thi... (read more)

You should probably specify which generation you're in =)

I'm 28. I don't know that the next generation has "gone too far", but the big difference I see between them and my generation is that we were the last generation to grow up without pervasive internet / smartphones / social networks. Facebook boomed (at least in Europe) right as I entered college.

What it entails is a lack of focus. I won't say my generation is very focused, but the next one is certainly worse. As a TA, I can witness this firsthand.

I thought the piece was interesting.

If I can offer some feedback on form, I also thought it was too long for what it did say, and conversely did not say some things I would have wanted it to.

For me, the gist of the article really is this:

What I really wanted out of the system, in each case, wasn't the most valuable thing to get, or what it had to teach me. What I wanted was me, and my own beliefs, and for everything to stay the same, so that my prime directive would be met.

This is somewhat relatable. It's intriguing! But

• is it true? I'm havin

Would the tl;dr "integrate the evidence presented by revealed preferences" be accurate?

Brings two things to mind:

• The Dark Arts of Rationality series and its compartmentalization and inconsistency techniques. I'm toying with that a bit, but I don't have a good account to give yet.
• The fact (apparently) that placebo work even if you know they are placebo.

So I'd say that clearly many people are getting self-reported benefits from self-deception.

Key in understanding the phenomenon is the system 1 / system 2 (fast / slow) distinction. Typically you know in system 2 that you are deceiving yourself but you act out the deception in system 1.

I don't think one can generalize so easily from bounded-options full-information games like those to the whole range of human endeavours.

I'm reading this, and it seems very reasonable, and then:

Changing our perspective might have significant benefits. Systematized winning is not an actionable definition. Most domains already have field specific knowledge on how to win, and in aggregate these organized practices are called society. The most powerful engine of systematized winning developed thus far is civilization.

So, assume civilization is a set of guidelines that dictate a course of actions. Just like rationality in fact. How can this beat rationality? If it dictates the correct c... (read more)

Why bother voting? Your vote will only change the result if it would otherwise be an exact tie; and the chance of that is negligible – one in millions.

But a chance of one in millions is worth taking if the jackpot is billions or trillions. That is, the opportunity for you to select a better rather than worse government, thereby making the country – though not yourself – billions or trillions of dollars better off. So as long as you care at least slightly about the rest of the country, voting is rational; civic duty really is a reason to vote.

That&#... (read more)

Bravo! This essay is very well put together, and it make my mind go "bling" a couple times.

I have experienced guilt for not taking well to criticism, and I feel this piece helps to explain why: the criticism didn't address my own unsatisfaction with the work, nor highlight what I thought was an important shortcoming. Looking forward, it required things of me without actually helping me making something better. But as you mentioned, feedback (just an alias for criticism) is almost sacred is certain circles nowadays.