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All of smiley314's Comments + Replies

Fermi Challenge: Trains and Air Cargo
Answer by smiley31430

Hi everyone! Very, very, very low confidence – these are my two very first Fermi estimates ever; so Feedback will be very much appreciated.

q1:

Let‘s assume that every train station has ten rail tracks and that every rail track at a train station is ten miles long. That makes 100 miles for every train station. How many train stations are there in the world – 10^6 (1.000.000)? Seems a bit low, let‘s go with 10^9. So that‘s 10^2 * 10^9 = 10^11 miles only for train stations.

So how long are train rails that actually connect train stations combined? Uh… Let‘s

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3Bird Concept
Congrats on making your first Fermi! You are taking the first step on and a long and rewarding journey of quantitative rationality :) 
Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon
Answer by smiley31470

Hi everyone! First of all, thanks for the training opportunity! I did eventually come up with 50 ideas, but I took longer than an hour. I expect almost all of them to be very very very unpractical (but that's apparently not an issue); some of them are more or less deliberately absurd (in the vein of "technically, it's not excluded by the rules..."). I do want to ask around: I personally would be in favor of a "culture of practice" here. What do you think?

  1. Are you actually on board with "building a culture of practice"?
  2. If at all, how often should there be
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2Bird Concept
1. Yes. :) I partially made this post as an experiment to see if others wanted this to. And I think the answer is a resounding "yes". I might announce the next steps soon! 2. I see multiple parts to this. * How often should you practice on your own? * How often should you practice together as a group? * What's the optimal trade-off between practicing and doing other things (e.g. just doing your job, doing research, "executing" on the skills you previously practiced)? * How fast do you hit diminishing returns for practicing various skills? I think it could be cool if LessWrong had something like a schedule of classes with two classes per day, and people went maybe as often as they go to the gym (2-4x per week). But the gym metaphor is doing a lot of work in that analogy and I don't actually know what the right frequency interval ought to be.  3. I like all your ideas. See also this thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gJR4StLkutHvcA6tc/what-are-good-rationality-exercises (it has a bunch of overlap). 
Open & Welcome Thread – October 2020
smiley314220

Hi everyone! :)

So I'm actually introducing myself now!

I'm a long-time lurker, 21 years old, living in Germany, and I'm currently in… the equivalent of high school (my education path is pretty serpentine – long story). I will hopefully be graduating next spring/summer and then presumably study mathematics.

I actually don‘t know how I first ended up here – I vaguely remember stumbling across a few articles and then succumbing to link-hopping (resulting in a few dozen open tabs). It seems to be ages since I know about LessWrong. Also, last December I attended ... (read more)

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5Ben Pace
Welcome :) Best of skill with reading The Sequences. And yeah, in the meantime do keep your eye out for anywhere that you can contribute something with a comment. See you around.