Reasoning through a new example:
There's no google maps and no internet to help with finding a hotel. You haven't chosen a destination city yet.
You could work out how to choose hotels and facilitate the group identifying the kind of hotel it wants. They're both robustly useful.
You could start picking out hotels in cities at random. Somehow my intuition is that doing this when you don't know the city is still marginally useful (you might choose that city. Obviously more useful the smaller the set of possible cities), but nonzero useful.
OTOH, one of the best ways to build hotel identifying skills is to identify a hotel, even if you don't use it. A few practice runs choosing hotels in random cities probably does help you make a new reservation in a different city.
My shoulder John says "dry running hotels is a fine thing to do as long as you're doing it as a part of a plan to get good at a generalizable skill". I agree that's ideal, but not everyone has that skill, and one of the ways to get it is to gradient ascend on gradient ascending. I worry that rhetoric like this, and related stuff I see in EA and rationality encouraging people to do the most important thing, ends up paralyzing people when what they need is to do anything so they can start iterating on it.
One possible reason: bouncing off early > putting in a lot of effort and realizing you'll still never get traction > being kicked out. Giving people false hope hurts them.
I don't think you should never help out a new person, but I reserve it for people with very specific flaws in otherwise great posts.
oh not at all, I think I'm failing on both fronts
We're looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to "represent one consistent thing". It's not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases "overall metabolic rate" or "stress". It's not an accident that those hormones' signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason to expect that they'll be straightforwardly interpretable, and therefore the sort of thing we can look at and (sometimes) intuitively say "I want to turn that up/down".
This sounds logical but I don't think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you're claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can't speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.
How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update.
People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement". Comments with additional details are welcome.
Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don't exist so that they have resumes "just in case"
I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women.
Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.
I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They're similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling.
Note that at time of donation, Altman was co-chair of the board but 2 years away from becoming CEO.