Because future rewards are discounted

Don't you mean future values? Also, AFAICT, the only thing going on here that seperates online from offline RL is that offline RL algorithms shape the initial value function to give conservative behaviour. And so you get conservative behaviour.

Since you seem interested in nootropics, I wonder if you've read Gwern's list of nootropic self-experiments? He covers a lot of supplements, some of which are pretty obscure AFAICT.~

EDIT: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics

No, it's just that my prior says nootropics almost never work so I was wondering if you had some data suggesting this did e.g. by dowing a RCT on yourself or using signal processing techniques to detect if supplementing this stuff lead to a causal change in reflex times or so forth.

EDIT: Though I am vegan and I'm really ignorant about what makes for a good diet. So I'd be curious to hear why it's helpful for vegans to take this stuff.

Why do you think DHA algea powder works?

Having a large set of small 2-10 minutes task on the screen may thus feel (incorrectly) overwhelming. 

The size of a task on the screen is a leaky abstraction (of it's length in time).

This is a valuable insight and makes reading this whole post worth it for me. And the obvious thought for how to correct this error is to attatch time-estimates for small tasks and convert them into a time-period view on a calendar. That way, it feels like "oh, I need 20 minutes to do all my chores today, better set a pomdoro" instead of "I have 20 things to do! 20 is big!"

Will have to try this. TEST: It doesn't look that big, though I'm including starting steps of longer term tasks. Hmm, this doesn't feel that bad, thought maybe that's the endorphins from deciding to test this talking. 

BTW I gave a strong upvote because I want to see more rationality related content on LW. Otherwise I would've given a normal upvote, or maybe not even that. Nevertheless, that still means this post gets a strong upvote.
 

I did notice that I learned much quicker than I have in the past when I’ve tried to learn instruments. Which tells me that my current character build optimisation towards learning and memory is working. That was a good data point to update on.

Wot. 

Please explain!

This is not a video, but I think it counts as a useful example of tacit knowledge. 

Domain: Google-fu

Link: https://gwern.net/search-case-studies

Person: Gwern

Background: Creator of consistently thorough essays

Why: Gwern talks you through what he did to hunt down obscure resources on the internet and in the process shows you how much dakka you could bring to bear on googling things you don't know.

Wow, I didn't realize just how bad student debt cancellation is from so many perspectives. Now I want more policy critiques like this. 

John Carmack is a famously honest man. To illustrate this, I'll give you two stories. When Carmack was a kid, he desperately wanted the macs in his schools computer lab. So he and a buddy tried to steal some. They got caught because Carmack's friend was too fat to get through the window. Carmack went to juvie. When the counselor asked him if he wouldn't get caught, would he do it again? Carmack answered yes for this counterfactual.

Later, when working as a young developer, Carmack and his fellow employees would take the company workstations home to code games over the weekend. Their boss eventually noticed this and wondered if they were borrowing company property without permission. He quickly hit on a foolproof plan to catch them: just ask Carmack because he cannot tell a lie. Carmack said yes. 

These stories aren't really a response to your point. I just find them to be hilarious examples of the inability to lie. They're also an existence proof of someone being unable to lie but still doing very well. 

Ah, that makes sense! Well, it does seem to work out for some businesses, in particular East Asian business conglomerates. Let me quote from a common cog article on the topic of near every company having an equillibrium point past which further growth is difficult w/o a line of capital.  

Chinese businessmen and the SME Loop

With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of successful traditional Chinese businessmen have chosen the route of escaping the SME loop by pursuing additional — and completely different — lines of businesses. This has led to the prevalence of ‘Asian conglomerates’ — where a parent holding company owns many subsidiaries in an incredibly diverse number of industries: energy, edible oils, shipping, real estate, hospitality, telecommunications and so on. The benefit of this structure has been to subsidise new business units with the profits of other business units.

Why a majority of Chinese businessmen chose this route remains a major source of mystery for me. When I left the point-of-sale business in late 2017, I wondered what steps my boss would take to escape the SME loop. And I began to wonder if the first generation of traditional Chinese businessmen chose the route of multiple diversified businesses because it was the easiest way to escape the SME loop ... or if perhaps there was something about developing markets that caused them to expand this way.

(And if so, why are there less such conglomerates in the West? Why are these conglomerates far more common in Asia? These are interesting questions — but the answers aren’t readily available to me; not for a few decades, and not until I’ve have had the experience of growing such businesses.)

Perhaps the right way to think about this is that the relentless pursuit of growth led them to expand into adjacent markets — and the markets for commodities and infrastructure was ripe for the taking in the early years of South East Asia’s development.

Here, we see that chinese businessmen expand to keep up their free cash flow to fund their attempts to innovate enough to keep growing to larger scales.